Members phkrause Posted August 11, 2024 Author Members Posted August 11, 2024 August 11, 2024 Good morning. Today, we’re writing about how schools are struggling to keep pace with technology — as well as the 2024 election, Israel and politics-free weddings. At a high school in Orlando, Fla. Zack Wittman for The New York Times The school tech problem By Natasha Singer I cover technology in schools. As the new school year begins, school districts across the United States are cracking down on cellphones in classrooms. Teachers are tired of constantly pressing students to stop watching TikTok and messaging friends during class. In many schools, students have also used phones to threaten or bully their classmates. As a result, as I note in a story today, at least eight states, including Indiana and Pennsylvania, have adopted measures this year to limit cellphones in schools. But the phone crackdowns illustrate a larger issue. Technology rules and safeguards in schools often lag far behind student use and abuse of digital tools. And it’s not just phones — school-issued laptops, tablets and classroom apps can also become sources of distraction and bullying. In today’s newsletter, I’ll highlight some of the tech challenges schools are facing. Student cellphone bans Schools have been trying to limit student phone use for decades. Maryland banned students from bringing pagers and “cellular telephones” to school in the late 1980s as illegal drug sales boomed. In the 1990s, as mobile phones gained traction, some schools barred the devices to stop the chirping from disrupting class. Since the 2000s, though, it’s also gone the other way. As school shootings became more common, many districts began allowing mobile phones as a safety measure. And, after the rise of iPhones, some schools that had barred cellphones reversed the bans in part because some lower-income students who did not own laptops used them for schoolwork. Now, phone bans are trending again, partly in response to public concerns over youth mental health and social media use. This year, Indiana, Louisiana and South Carolina passed laws that bar student cellphone use either during class or the entire school day. Some governors have been bullish, promising “cellphone-free” learning and decreased classroom screen time. The bans are hardly school tech panaceas. But they can have positive effects. Some schools have reported increased student engagement and fewer incidents of phone-related fights and bullying. But there are mixed reports on whether the bans actually improve students’ academic outcomes. A.I. abuse The problem facing schools, though, is that technology often moves faster than policy. As districts were still wrestling with cellphones, a new threat arose: artificial intelligence. In early 2023, some prominent districts rushed to block A.I.-powered chatbots on school-issued student laptops and school Wi-Fi. Administrators feared that chatbots like ChatGPT, which can generate human-sounding book reports and other texts, could enable mass cheating. So many schools were caught off guard last fall when male students began using other A.I. tools for a darker purpose: to create fake sexually explicit images of their female classmates. In one New Jersey high school, administrators announced over the school intercom the names of girls who had been subjected to the faked images. In a Seattle-area high school, boys shared A.I.-generated nude images of ninth-grade girls in the lunchroom. But the school did not report the incident to the authorities until a police detective, who heard about it from the girls’ parents, informed administrators they were required to do so. A.I. cheating fears have since abated, as districts start to train both educators and students how to use chatbots as tools for teaching and learning. But so far, few schools have developed specific policies or rules around A.I. image abuse. In Orlando, Fla. Zack Wittman for The New York Times Distracting classroom tech Remote learning during the pandemic made school-issued laptops, along with school messaging and learning apps, far more common. But even apps intended to help students research topics, write essays and collaborate with peers can lead to distractions and enable bullying. Teachers say students regularly use school-issued devices like iPads to surreptitiously take photos of their classmates, and then use the images to spread mean memes through school communication tools like Microsoft Teams. (Microsoft said schools could use controls in Teams to monitor or block student chats.) Students are also often able to bypass school internet filters and spend class time playing games or watching YouTube videos. In many schools, students spend much of the day glued to these laptops or tablets, meaning phone bans may not ultimately reduce overall classroom screen time. To remedy the school tech problem, critics say, lawmakers must push social media platforms, A.I. start-ups and other technology developers to install the digital equivalent of speed limits, seatbelts and airbags. Districts, they say, must also do a better job of educating teachers and students on tech harms and responsible technology use. Essentially, some say, we should follow the model of another program that has for many decades taught young people how to handle powerful machines without harming themselves or others: It’s called drivers’ ed. Tell your story: I’d love to hear from educators, students and parents about your experiences with school tech. If you’re interested, you can share them with me here. THE LATEST NEWS Democratic Campaign Kamala Harris Bridget Bennett for The New York Times Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump in three battleground states, according to surveys by The Times and Siena College. Her candidacy has upended the fundamentals of this election, Nate Cohn writes. Black male leaders are trying to counter an uncomfortable truth: A small but significant proportion of Black men have been hesitant to support Black women seeking high positions of power. Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, has a long relationship with China. He has drawn on that to criticize Beijing’s human rights record. Harris is campaigning as if she is winning, even as she cautions that she and Walz remain the underdogs. Read takeaways from the first week of the Harris-Walz ticket. Republican Campaign People close to Trump say that he has been in a foul mood since President Biden’s withdrawal and is disoriented by his new contest. Read reporting from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Joy, rage and Smirnoff Ice: A music festival headlined by the pro-Trump musician Kid Rock was a snapshot of a maturing American subculture. Trump threatened to sue The Times over its coverage of his claims to have been in a dangerous helicopter landing with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco. International In northern Gaza. Mahmoud Zaki/EPA, via Shutterstock An Israeli airstrike hit a school compound in northern Gaza where displaced Palestinians were sheltering, killing dozens of people, according to Gazan officials. The Israeli military said Hamas was using the facility. France entered the Olympics shaken by an unexpected election. It exits with a new self-confidence. China has built dozens of new villages along its disputed borders and paid people to move into them. Other Big Stories In Belzoni, Miss. Rory Doyle for The New York Times The death of a 30-year-old Black woman in Mississippi exposes the ways in which social and economic factors endanger pregnant women in the U.S. San Francisco is offering a program of free rent for up to six months to try to bring businesses back to its downtown. Susan Wojcicki, who became a prominent female Silicon Valley executive with her leadership of YouTube, died at 56. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Is Tim Walz too progressive? Yes. Kamala Harris’s running mate could have demonstrated a move to the center — but she chose Walz. “At this point, Harris herself is going to need to show that she can stand up to the Democratic base voters,” Carolyn Bourdeaux, a former member of Congress, writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. No. Walz gives rural voters permission to embrace progressive ideas, and to vote for a party they might otherwise consider too urban. “His position essentially is this: If being progressive means that we take care of working families, then he will wear that as a badge of honor,” The Washington Post’s Michele Norris writes. FROM OPINION “CBS Evening News” is replacing its female anchor with two men. The decision puts the industry more behind the times than it already was, Katie Couric writes. Juan Gabriel was a musician who represented both queerness and his Mexican roots. He taught Mexicans that the two identities don’t have to be at odds, Maria Garcia writes. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on Biden and Maureen Dowd on Trump. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS One reader wrote about her mother’s unfulfilled dream of seeing Monet’s “Water Lilies.” DeAgostini/Getty Images; Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris Monet and “Moana”: The Times asked readers to share what got them through their grief. Here’s what they said. Routine: A subway mosaic artist spends her Sundays making Taiwanese breakfast and practicing the violin. Tastemakers: Dirt, a trendy newsletter about digital culture, has big ambitions. A politics-free zone: Some couples are trying to prevent their weddings from becoming venues for heated debates. Vows: Three rings, two college students and one big risk. Lives Lived: Eddie Canales was a human rights advocate who fought to save migrants trekking through the harsh terrain of South Texas. He died at 76. THE INTERVIEW Senator James Lankford Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By Lulu Garcia-Navarro This week’s subject for The Interview is Senator James Lankford, a Republican who negotiated the bipartisan immigration bill that Trump helped defeat earlier this year — the same bill that Harris has promised to revive if she becomes president. You seem to have won every concession from Democrats that Republicans wanted. And I’m curious now, in hindsight, why you think that’s true. Do you think Democrats and the Biden administration in particular realized that they had a problem on their hands at the southern border? So, yes, I believe that the administration came to the table because they understood this is spiraling out of control. And quite frankly, I think they perceived they could say, “OK, those crazy Republicans, they forced us to be able to pass this bill, so we’re going to implement this,” when they actually quietly wanted to say, “OK, we’ve got to make this stop.” Were you optimistic that it could succeed? I was. And all signs indicated that your optimism was actually founded until Trump came out forcefully against the bill. He was basically whipping against it from Mar-a-Lago. Did he call you personally? We did not talk during that time period, actually. And on my part, that was intentional, because of that exact question. I didn’t want this to be perceived as, this is President Trump actually trying to run this bill. That would be toxic to my Democrat colleagues. I honestly believe that exact bill would have passed in December, but by the time it got into February, it became immediately the major focus in the election, because, as you recall, the Republican primary suddenly got resolved. It looked very obvious that President Trump was going to be there, and everything collapsed at that point. If that bill would have gone in December, I think it would have passed. Read more of the interview here. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine. BOOKS Members of The Bookshop Band. Mary Turner for The New York Times Two worlds: The Bookshop Band performs music inspired by literature. A Times writer went on a musical pilgrimage to see the group perform. A literary guide: Read your way around Denver. Recommendations: “I thought I disliked these authors. I was happy to be wrong.” Our editors’ picks: “Frostbite,” about how refrigeration changed our food and our planet, and five other books. Times best sellers: Fred Trump III portrays the complex legacy of his family in “All in the Family.” It is new this week on the hardcover nonfiction list. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Listen to songs with great guitar cues. Watch the Perseids meteor shower reach its peak tonight. Clean your yoga mat. Use the best grill tools. THE WEEK AHEAD What to Watch For The closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics is today. Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont and Wisconsin hold congressional primaries on Tuesday. Meal Plan Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne. If you have an overstuffed freezer, it may be time to clear it out. In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Mia Leimkuhler offers recipes to help you do that, including a West Indian coconut curry with cod, spicy shrimp patties and broccoli-walnut pesto pasta. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were kitchen, kitchenette and thicken. Can you put eight historical events — including the X-Men and the Hubble Space Telescope — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 12, 2024 Author Members Posted August 12, 2024 August 12, 2024 Good morning. We’re covering changes to the global supply chain — as well as the Trump campaign, Ukrainian summer camps and the Olympic closing ceremony. A mask factory in Paterson, N.J. Bryan Anselm for The New York Times The supply chain, reconfigured By Peter S. Goodman I cover the global economy. For decades, major companies have behaved as if geographic distance were almost irrelevant. A factory in China was the same as a factory in Michigan. The internet, container shipping and international trading arrangements had supposedly shrunk the globe. No longer. The pandemic and geopolitical upheavals have exposed the risks of depending on faraway industry to make critical things like computer chips, protective gear and medicines. I recently wrote a book on this topic, “How the World Ran Out of Everything.” I’ll use today’s newsletter to help you understand why commerce has changed — and how companies and governments are reacting. The pandemic shock The emergence of Covid in China ended the previous version of globalization. Quarantines shut Chinese factories at the same time that Western consumers, stuck in lockdown, ordered more manufactured goods like exercise equipment and electronic gadgets. This combination of reduced supply and surging demand made other countries realize that they had become heavily dependent on a single nation — China — for many items, including medical supplies. Covid eventually faded from the headlines, but policymakers and business executives in the United States and Europe faced pressure to diminish their reliance on China. A central reason for concern was the rise of geopolitical tensions. China wasn’t merely the world’s factory; it is also an autocracy that, under President Xi Jinping, has become more aggressive in asserting global influence. Xi, for instance, has been vocal about bringing Taiwan under China’s control, using force if necessary. Taiwan is the dominant manufacturer of the most advanced varieties of computer chips. China’s allies have also become more assertive in ways that have disrupted global commerce. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine triggered sanctions on Russia, which limited Europe’s access to energy. The war reduced the flow of grains and fertilizers to Africa and Asia because Russia and Ukraine are both major sources of these goods. In the Middle East, Houthi rebels in Yemen are firing missiles on ships headed toward the Suez Canal as an expression of solidarity with Palestinians. In response, many vessels moving between Asia and Europe are traveling the long way around Africa. That has added as much as two weeks to their journeys while lifting shipping prices. The climate plays a role in the disruption, too. Water levels in the Panama Canal fell during the recent dry season, bringing restrictions on the number of vessels that could pass. All these developments are forcing companies to reconfigure their supply chains. Globalization’s next phase The main strategy would have countries make more goods at home. President Biden signed a law that allows for the spending of tens of billions of dollars to subsidize computer chips and electric vehicle manufacturers in the United States. Europe has joined the United States in protecting its domestic auto industry against an influx of low-priced, Chinese-made electric vehicles. President Biden at the Intel Ocotillo Campus in Chandler, Ariz. Tom Brenner for The New York Times Wealthy nations are also sending their orders elsewhere. Vietnam has gained factory orders, and India has emerged as another alternative. As the world’s most populous nation, India might eventually develop a supply chain rivaling China’s. Walmart is now moving some production from China to India. In the short term, Mexico is a more realistic option for companies that sell many goods in the United States. Mexico has low labor costs plus road and rail connections to American consumers. Asian companies that make parts for U.S. automakers are already setting up factories in Mexico. The supply chain is like the electrical grid — something we take for granted, as long as the lights turn on when we flip the switch. But now we’ve endured the equivalent of a blackout, forcing us to contemplate what systems we are depending on — and how to make them more reliable. For more Have we learned anything from the pandemic supply-chain crisis? Malaysia is now a crucial part of the chip supply chain, as U.S. and European companies look to diversify from China. The U.S. blocks China from buying some microchips used for artificial intelligence. China is skirting the bans with smugglers and front companies. A Taiwanese chip plant outside Phoenix has struggled with culture clashes between its managers and American workers. THE LATEST NEWS 2024 Election Donald Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times Donald Trump said his campaign was hacked by Iran. It is unclear what, if anything, the hackers were able to achieve. Biden, in his first interview since the end of his re-election campaign, said he abandoned his bid because he didn’t want to create “a real distraction” for Democrats. Trump falsely claimed in a series of social media posts that Kamala Harris used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds at her events. Biden and Silicon Valley had a sometimes frosty relationship. A Harris fund-raiser in San Francisco was a chance to reset relations. How do the 2024 presidential and vice-presidential candidates’ professional records compare? See their career timelines. Israel-Hamas War Israel ordered civilians to evacuate from part of a humanitarian zone in southwestern Gaza. It said it was planning to fight in the area because Hamas had “embedded terrorist infrastructure” there. “This is worse than I ever could have imagined”: An American doctor spent three weeks in one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals. Watch some of the video he captured. More International News Morning exercises in Ukraine. Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times In Ukraine, traditional summer camps for young people are striking a more militaristic and patriotic tone. A wildfire is spreading near Athens. It has damaged buildings and prompted evacuations. A landslide at a garbage dump in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, has killed at least 21 people, according to local officials, Reuters reports. Gangs in Haiti have sidestepped the U.N.-backed Kenyan security forces, redirecting their attacks to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Britain’s anti-immigration riots highlighted a bigger challenge for Prime Minister Keir Starmer: fraying public services and a cost of living crisis. Filipinos living on a contested island in the South China Sea are on the frontier of a possible conflict. Other Big Stories Global warming could trigger changes to the natural world that would be hard, if not impossible, to reverse. Read how close the planet is to its climate tipping points. In Las Vegas, nights have been getting hotter much faster than the days. Hot nights, studies show, can be deadly. Some I.V.F. clinics are moving frozen embryos out of red states, prompted by an Alabama court’s ruling that deemed them “unborn children.” Opinions The investigative technique that put Charles Don Flores on death row is now prohibited in Texas. He’s about to be executed anyway, he says for Opinion Video. Let’s call the far-right protests in Britain what they are: Islamophobic, Hibaq Farah writes. The U.S. government can encourage more Americans to eat vegetables by teaching them how to cook them, Bee Wilson argues. Here are columns by Ezra Klein on the Harris campaign, Nicholas Kristof on travel advice and David French on conservatism. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS In New South Wales, Australia. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times Dirt: An Australian start-up wants to use fungi to slow climate change. California rice royalty: Koda Farms influenced generations of chefs to cook with American-grown, Japanese-style rice. It will soon close shop. Constantly online: Want to know what’s happening on the internet? Listen to these podcasts. New York: This bike-riding barber travels around the city in search of the “dopest” places to cut hair. Metropolitan Diary: The perfect head for that hat. Lives Lived: Bob Tischler was part of the production and writing team that helped revive “Saturday Night Live” after the show’s low point during the 1980-81 season. He died at 78. OLYMPICS Au revoir! Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times Closing ceremony: An uncharacteristically giddy Paris bid farewell to the Games, passing the torch to the next host, Los Angeles (via Tom Cruise). Los Angeles: The 2028 Games will be the third for the city as host. It will be a challenge to repeat the success of 1984. Gymnastics: Jordan Chiles will lose her bronze medal in the floor exercise after a court invalidated a correction to the American’s score. Basketball: The U.S. women’s team won its eighth straight Olympic gold medal after beating France. Read a recap. Medal count: At the end of the Games, the U.S. topped the total medal count (126) and tied China for the most golds (40). Superlatives: The Athletic team picked their favorite moments of the 2024 Olympics. ARTS AND IDEAS Backstage at Miu Miu’s spring 2024 show. Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times Miu Miu, Prada’s little sister brand, has become fashion’s biggest success story. It sets trends like the extreme miniskirt and is currently halfway to $1 billion in sales for 2024. As hot as the brand’s growth has been, it also is a bit of a mystery, Jessica Testa writes. More on culture The movie adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us” is on track to earn $50 million in North America on its opening weekend. Disney announced it will expand its fleet of cruise ships and spend billions on new rides at its theme parks. The rapper Young Thug’s trial on racketeering and gang conspiracy charges, already the longest trial in Georgia’s history, is set to resume today. Read what happens now. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Johnny Miller for The New York Times Smother these juicy garlic-and-herb filled meatballs in greens. Avoid online scams. Roam with cowboys and flamingos in southern France. Find a better way to store your toilet paper. Gift the golfer in your life something useful. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were backlot and bootblack. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 13, 2024 Author Members Posted August 13, 2024 August 13, 2024 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering Ukraine’s incursion into Russia — plus the Musk and Trump interview, Gaza cease-fire talks and Sweden’s tech industry. Ukrainian men carrying a dead Russian soldier in Sudzha, Russia. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times On Russian soil Ukraine’s efforts to retake territory from Russia have stalled. But the Ukrainian military has tried to get back at Moscow in other ways. In the past, it has launched drone attacks in Russia and backed hit-and-run incursions in which Russian exiles struck targets inside their former homeland. Last week, Ukraine tried something new. Its own forces marched miles across the Russian border in a surprise operation. They now control some Russian land in the region of Kursk, including dozens of towns and villages. “It’s an attempt to give Russia somewhat of a shock,” my colleague Eric Schmitt, who covers national security, told me. “It could give Ukraine a win, or at least make them feel good for a few days. Does it change the larger calculus on the battlefield? That remains to be seen.” Ukraine’s leaders are seeking to galvanize support at home and abroad for its war effort. An assault on Russian soil might not get Ukraine closer to seizing all of the land it has lost, but it shows that Ukraine can still surprise — and embarrass — its enemy. Today’s newsletter explains why Ukraine is trying a new tactic two years into a stalemate with Russia. Potential upside What does Ukraine stand to gain from its latest attack? Analysts and officials have pointed to a few possibilities: Ukraine wants to divert Russian troops from strategic locations. If the Kremlin moves soldiers from battlefields in northeastern, eastern or southern Ukraine to defend itself at home, Ukraine might have an easier time retaking its own land. Russia currently controls about 20 percent of Ukraine, and Ukrainian leaders say they want to retake all of it. Morale at home has declined. Ukraine’s last big counteroffensive success came in the fall of 2022, when its military retook the northeastern region of Kharkiv. Meanwhile, soldiers continue to die, and civilians endure regular bombardments. Russia has taken bits of land in Ukraine’s east and northeast. The economy remains weak. A major strike could help rebuild domestic confidence in the war effort. Ukraine wants to shore up support abroad. Kyiv has relied on aid from Western nations to defend itself. But voters in those countries are no longer as enthusiastic about supplying Ukraine with weapons. Some leaders, including Donald Trump, have suggested they want to cut off the aid. A battlefield victory against Russia, even if it’s not strategically important, could get skittish supporters back on board. Ukraine wants to convince Washington that it can strike within Russia. American officials have barred Ukraine from using U.S.-made weapons to strike too deep into Russian territory. They worry that such an attack could lead Russia to act more recklessly. But if the current incursion doesn’t lead to an escalation, American officials may allow future Ukrainian salvos farther across the border. Will any of this work? Some analysts are skeptical. Russia’s military drastically outnumbers Ukraine’s. Moscow still has reserves of conscripts that it has not deployed in the war, so it might not need to divert troops from strategic locations to reinforce its borders. And the intended audience for this new move — in Ukraine and abroad — may not see much value if it doesn’t help Ukraine win back its territory. Planning ahead At the Sudzha border post. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times Ukraine might also hope to use holdings in Kursk as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations, to trade for land previously seized by Russia. To do that, Ukraine would have to actually keep what it takes. Given how overburdened its military is already, that may not be possible. And if Ukraine suffered heavy losses trying to hold foreign terrain, the incursion would amount to a disaster. “It’s a huge gamble on the part of the Ukrainians,” Eric said. But Ukraine also has to plan for eventual negotiations with Russia. Trump has suggested that if he wins this year’s election, he will force Ukraine to work out a peace deal with Russia. That would likely require Ukraine to give up most or all of the territory that Russia currently holds. Ukraine desperately wants to avoid that scenario. To do so, it needs something that Russia will want enough to make concessions. More on the war Vladimir Putin criticized the West over Ukraine’s incursion, a sign that the attack has unsettled Russia even as Putin insists that it will not change his negotiating position. Ukraine planned the attack surreptitiously, disguising troop movements as training exercises. Senior officers learned of the offensive just days before it began. It is the biggest foreign incursion into Russia since World War II. “I’m happy to be riding a tank into Russia, and it is better than them driving tanks into our country,” a Ukrainian soldier told The Times. China and Russia are stepping up cooperation between their militaries, and holding joint exercises near Alaska and Taiwan in defiance of the U.S. and its allies. THE LATEST NEWS Musk and Trump Interview Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago taking part in an online discussion with Elon Musk. Margo Martin/X, via Reuters Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, interviewed the candidate live on X. Glitches delayed the event by around 40 minutes; Musk blamed a cyberattack. Trump complained about President Biden’s exit from the race, calling Kamala Harris’s nomination “a coup” and repeating familiar falsehoods. Read a fact check. During the more than two-hour discussion, Musk offered frequent praise. “You can actually have a conversation with you,” Musk told Trump. “And you can’t have a conversation with Biden or Kamala.” Earlier in the day, Trump made his first posts on X in almost a year. The platform banned him after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, but Musk reinstated his account after buying the company. More on the 2024 Election The F.B.I. is investigating an apparent hack of the Trump campaign, days after the former president said Iran had launched a cyberattack. A law enforcement official said investigators were also looking into an attempt to infiltrate accounts associated with the Democrats’ presidential campaign. A judge ruled that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could not appear on New York’s ballot because he had used a “sham” address to maintain his New York residency. Kennedy vowed to appeal. As president, Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Now, he and other Republicans claim they want to improve it. Trump claimed without evidence that Harris’s campaign used A.I. to generate or doctor an image of a crowd of supporters at a rally. In fact, thousands were there. In November, Arizonans will vote on a ballot initiative to make abortion a protected right under the state Constitution, The A.P. reports. Trump Shooting Representative Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican, was in the crowd when a would-be assassin opened fire on Trump. He’s now leading a bipartisan task force that will help investigate the shooting. The task force’s top Democrat is Jason Crow, a veteran who was a manager in the first Trump impeachment trial. Middle East Benjamin Netanyahu Pool photo by Naama Grynbaum Benjamin Netanyahu has added new conditions to Israel’s demands in Gaza cease-fire talks, documents show. Israeli negotiators worry it could impede a deal. Netanyahu criticized his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, after Israeli news media reported that Gallant had called Netanyahu’s goal of total victory over Hamas “nonsense.” Nearly two weeks have passed since Iran vowed to attack Israel over the assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran. Here’s where the conflict stands. More International News Managing traffic in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Atul Loke for The New York Times The student protesters who toppled Bangladesh’s leader are now trying to restore order, taking up positions as cabinet ministers and traffic cops. Pakistan’s military arrested a former spy chief, accusing him of political meddling and corruption. The arrest is seen as part of a crackdown on allies of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Sweden’s tech industry is strong, thanks in part to Spotify, Skype and Candy Crush. It could be a model for other European nations. Other Big Stories The U.S. is processing citizenship requests at the fastest clip in a decade, reducing a backlog that built up during the Trump administration and the pandemic. A Colorado jury convicted a former county clerk of tampering with voting machines in a failed attempt to prove Trump’s false fraud claims about the 2020 election. Two polar bears killed a worker at a remote radar station in Canada. A 4.4-magnitude earthquake hit an area near Los Angeles. A seismologist described it as “a decent shake, though not huge.” Opinions Voters are starting to trust Harris on the economy not because it’s improving, but because Trump hasn’t connected her with Biden’s policies, Kristen Soltis Anderson writes. (Anderson assesses the latest polls each Tuesday in the Opinion Today newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.) If Russia wins the war in Ukraine, the U.S., which failed to protect its allies, will be the biggest loser, Anastasia Edel writes. Here are columns by Paul Krugman on calling Harris a communist and Michelle Goldberg on election lies. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS In Torrevieja, Spain. Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York Times Spain is thirsty: The nation, like other dry countries, is increasingly reliant on desalination plants for its water needs. Harris’ or Harris’s? The Harris-Walz ticket has grammar geeks in overdrive. Germany: The State of Berlin owns a villa that once belonged to a Nazi propaganda minister. No one quite knows what to do with it. Ask Well: Can stress actually turn your hair gray? Lives Lived: Paul Bucha was an Army captain who earned a Medal of Honor after saving fellow soldiers during the Vietnam War. Bucha later played a role in the presidential bids of Ross Perot, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama. He died at 80. SPORTS Gymnastics: The court that overturned Jordan Chiles’s Olympic bronze-medal score in floor exercise said it would not reopen the case after a request from U.S.A. Gymnastics. N.F.L.: The New York Jets defensive end Haason Reddick requested a trade just months after being dealt to the franchise. ARTS AND IDEAS In Chicago. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times Chicago is debuting new public art throughout the city ahead of next week’s Democratic convention. As part of the effort, the city has created a sort of moving mural — elevated trains covered in works by emerging artists, all of which explore themes of democracy. “It’s all democracy related and fabulous,” said Bob Faust, the project’s curator. Read more about it. More on culture Twenty-five years after the Grammy-winning album that reshaped Shelby Lynne’s career, she has unlocked a new creative groove. People are speculating online about a feud between Blake Lively, who stars in and produced the film “It Ends With Us,” and Justin Baldoni, her co-star and the movie’s director, The Cut reports. Rachael Lillis, an actress who voiced Misty and Jessie on the 1990s “Pokémon” TV series, died at 55. Jon Stewart discussed Trump’s comments about Harris’s crowd sizes on “The Daily Show.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Yossy Arefi for The New York Times (Photography and Styling Make a bright and herbaceous macaroni salad. Read these books after you’ve watched “It Ends With Us.” Grill ultrathin smash burgers with this tool. Wash your bras the right way. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Note: Yesterday’s newsletter mistakenly included the wrong Spelling Bee image. You can play the correct Monday puzzle here. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —German P.S. The Times’s editorial board, which operates independently of the newsroom, will no longer make endorsements in New York races. The board will continue to endorse presidential candidates. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 14, 2024 Author Members Posted August 14, 2024 August 14, 2024 Good morning. We’re covering the global race to control A.I. — as well as the 2024 election, extreme heat and “romantasy” books. At a chip factory in Dresden, Germany. Sean Gallup/Getty Images National tech By Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur We’ve reported on this topic for a year from seven countries. As artificial intelligence advances, many nations are worried about being left behind. The urgency is understandable. A.I. is improving quickly. It could soon reshape the global economy, automate jobs, turbocharge scientific research and even change how wars are waged. World leaders want companies in their country to control A.I. — and they want to benefit from its power. They fear that if they do not build powerful A.I. at home, they will be left dependent on a foreign country’s creations. So A.I. nationalism — the idea that a country must develop its own tech to serve its own interests — is spreading. Countries have enacted new laws and regulations. They’ve formed new alliances. The United States, perhaps the best positioned in the global A.I. race, is using trade policy to cut off China from key microchips. In France, the president has heaped praise upon a startup focused on chatbots and other tools that excel in French and other non-English languages. And in Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pouring billions into A.I. development and striking deals with companies like Amazon, I.B.M. and Microsoft to make his country a major new hub. “We must rise to the challenge of A.I., or risk losing the control of our future,” warned a recent report by the French government. In today’s newsletter, we’ll explain who is winning and what could come next. ChatGPT’s impact The race to control A.I. started, in part, with a board game. In 2016, computers made by Google’s DeepMind won high-profile matches in the board game Go, demonstrating a breakthrough in the ability of A.I. to behave in humanlike ways. Beijing took note. Chinese officials set aside billions and crafted a policy to become a world leader in A.I. Officials integrated A.I. into the country’s vast surveillance system, giving the technology a uniquely authoritarian bent. A high-school ChatGPT workshop in Walla Walla, Wash. Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York Times Still, China’s best firms were caught off guard by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022. The companies raced to catch up. They’ve made some progress, but censorship and regulations have hampered development. ChatGPT also inspired more countries to join the race. Companies in the United Arab Emirates, India and France have raised billions of dollars from investors, with varying degrees of state aid. Governments in different nations have provided subsidies, bankrolled semiconductor plants and erected new trade barriers. America’s advantage The U.S. has advantages other countries cannot yet match. American tech giants control the most powerful A.I. models and spend more than companies abroad to build them. Top engineers and developers still aspire to a career in Silicon Valley. Few regulations stand in the way of development. American firms have the easiest access to precious A.I. chips, mostly designed by Nvidia in California. The White House is using these chips to undercut Chinese competition. In 2022, the U.S. imposed new rules that cut China off from the chips. Without them, companies simply cannot keep pace. The U.S. is also using chips as leverage over other countries. In April, Microsoft worked with the U.S. government to cut a deal with a state-linked Emirati company to give it access to powerful chips. In exchange, the firm had to stop using much of its Chinese technology and submit to U.S. government and Microsoft oversight. Saudi Arabia could make a similar deal soon. What comes next Looming over the development of A.I. are lessons of the past. Many countries watched major American companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon — reshape their societies, not always for the better. They want A.I. to be developed differently. The aim is to capture the benefits of the technology in areas like health care and education without undercutting privacy or spreading misinformation. The E.U. is leading the push for regulation. Last year, it passed a law to limit the use of A.I. in realms that policymakers considered the riskiest to human rights and safety. The U.S. has required companies to limit the spread of deep fakes. In China, where A.I. has been used to surveil its citizens, the government is censoring what chatbots can say and restricting what kind of data that algorithms can be trained on. A.I. nationalism is part of a wider fracturing of the internet, where services vary based on local laws and national interests. What’s left is a new kind of tech world where the effects of A.I. in your life may just depend on where you live. More on A.I. Saudi Arabia is spending billions on computing power and A.I. research. Several Chinese companies have unveiled A.I. technologies that rival leading American systems. Scammers are using A.I.-generated videos of Elon Musk and other billionaires to trick people into buying sham investments. A bill to regulate A.I. is winding its way through the California Legislature. THE LATEST NEWS 2024 Election Gov. Tim Walz Mark Abramson for The New York Times At a campaign event, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, defended his Army National Guard service. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, has accused Walz of misrepresenting parts of his military background. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, has faced renewed scrutiny over whether he was too slow to deploy troops during riots after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. In an interview on X, Trump praised Musk for suppressing employees’ efforts to unionize. The United Automobile Workers union, which has endorsed Harris, filed federal labor charges against them both. Democrats hope that abortion measures — which will be on the ballot in Arizona, Nevada and other states this fall — will boost turnout. New voter registration figures in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, two swing states, suggest that Harris’s candidacy is energizing Democrats. A man broke into a Trump campaign office in Virginia over the weekend. The police are investigating it as a burglary. More on Politics Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a progressive member of the “squad” who has criticized Israel, beat a more moderate Democrat to win her primary. Eric Hovde, a Trump-endorsed businessman, won the Republican nomination for Senate in Wisconsin. He’ll face Senator Tammy Baldwin, a second-term Democrat. President Biden, whose son Beau died of aggressive brain cancer, announced $150 million in funding for cancer surgery research. While Biden was vice president, his son Hunter asked the U.S. ambassador to Italy for a meeting on behalf of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company whose board Hunter sat on. Biden’s lawyer said nothing came of the request. Middle East In Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. Ramadan Abed/Reuters A Hamas official said that the group would not attend cease-fire talks scheduled for Thursday. The representative said Hamas leaders did not think Israel was negotiating in good faith. Iran criticized the leaders of Britain, France and Germany for urging restraint following the assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran, saying it had the right to defend its sovereignty. A growing number of security officials and politicians in Israel believe it is the right time for an offensive against the Lebanese group Hezbollah, The Wall Street Journal reports. More International News Fumio Kishida will step down as Japan’s prime minister next month. He’s unpopular, and others in the governing party had pressured him to quit. British counterterrorism police charged pro-Palestinian activists with violent disorder for breaking into an Israeli arms manufacturer in England. Tanzanian police arrested over 500 people across the country ahead of a banned anti-government youth rally. U.S.-backed talks for a cease-fire in Sudan begin today in Switzerland, as civil war pushes the country deeper into famine. Sudan’s military said it would not attend. Extreme heat is closing schools around the world for days or weeks at a time, threatening global education gains. Business Starbucks ousted its C.E.O. and replaced him with the chief executive of Chipotle, Brian Niccol. The free streaming service Tubi has exploded in popularity in the past 18 months, drawing even with Disney+ in total viewing time. Overseers of the Panama Canal want to store more water after a drought forced them to limit shipping last year. Their plan could threaten farmers’ livelihoods. Other Big Stories A candlelight vigil for Ta’Kiya Young in Columbus, Ohio. Courtney Hergesheimer/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated Press An Ohio police officer was charged with murder in the fatal shooting last year of a pregnant Black woman. Hot weather in the U.S. is melting mail-order medicines inside delivery trucks. A brain disease is affecting the people of New Brunswick, Canada. Despite years of research, no one knows why. Opinions Vance converted to Catholicism in his 30s. His rise shows the influence that Catholic thought still wields in politics, Matthew Schmitz writes. Here are columns by Bret Stephens on Israel and Lydia Polgreen on trans health care. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS In Canada. Bryan Denton for The New York Times Wildfires: Parts of Canada’s boreal forest are burning faster than they can regrow. Washed ashore: While cleaning up after Hurricane Debby, a woman found a message in a bottle from 1945. Medical language: Abortion wasn’t always considered a loaded term. Need a hero? The American left has, for years, been wary of charismatic figureheads. A movement without leaders has its limits. Lives Lived: The model Peggy Moffitt helped define the look of the 1960s, but she was best known for one image: a 1964 shot, taken by her photographer husband, in which she posed in a topless bathing suit. She died at 86. SPORTS Sean Stellato: The sports agent found fame thanks to his outlandish clothes, outsize personality and embrace of the N.F.L.’s underdogs. N.F.L.: The Minnesota Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy needs knee surgery. M.L.B.: The Houston Astros slugger Yordan Alvarez appeared to break the Tampa Bay Rays’ scoreboard with a batting practice home run. The player joked he’s “not paying that bill.” ARTS AND IDEAS With a robot server. Maggie Shannon for The New York Times We live in an age when robots are more than capable of flipping burgers and pouring coffee. So why haven’t more restaurants embraced automation? The reasons are not technological but emotional, Meghan McCarron writes: “People come to restaurants to feel connected to other humans. They want to encounter people, not a chatbot, kiosk or mechanical arm.” More on culture Haley Joel Osment Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times Haley Joel Osment had his breakthrough in the 1999 hit “The Sixth Sense.” Since then, he’s worked steadily, finding a balance that has eluded some former child stars. A new crop of books embraces the fantasy of falling for an older crush — like, 500 years older. “A big night for weird old rich guys with no friends”: Stephen Colbert recapped Musk and Trump’s interview on “The Late Show.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Bryan Gardner for The New York Times Toss a fleshy white fish in tikka marinade and scatter over a bed of spinach. See the best white T-shirts. Revitalize a vintage rug. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were nonviolent and violent. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 16, 2024 Author Members Posted August 16, 2024 August 15, 2024 Good morning. Today, we’re covering a catastrophic civil war in Sudan — as well as Ukraine, the U.S. economy and extreme fan culture. In Omdurman, Sudan. Ivor Prickett for The New York Times A country in ruins By Declan Walsh I’m The Times’s chief Africa correspondent, based in Nairobi, Kenya. After more than a year of civil war, the toll in Sudan is heartbreaking: thousands killed, millions scattered and cities besieged or destroyed across a vast nation three times as large as France. Much of the capital lies in rubble. This month, international officials declared that part of Sudan was in a famine. At least 100 people die of hunger every day. And there are signs it could soon get much worse. Recently, I spent three weeks in Sudan, traveling across a part of the world that few foreign reporters have reached. The scale and intensity of destruction were startling: A conflict that started as a power struggle between rival generals has metastasized into a far bigger and messier conflagration, threatening to spread chaos across an already fragile region. By The New York Times Despite all that, the conflict has received scant attention from world leaders or money for humanitarian aid. But its soaring human cost is making it ever harder to ignore. U.N. experts warn that Sudan is again spiraling into genocidal violence, as it did in the early 2000s. Samantha Power, the head of USAID, says it is “the single largest humanitarian crisis on the planet.” One faint glimmer of hope lies in tentative peace talks, mediated by the United States, that started in Switzerland yesterday. Today’s newsletter explains the stakes: how an unexpected civil war is crushing Africa’s third-largest country — and what could stop the suffering. Hope on the ropes Only five years ago, Sudan was the source of euphoric hopes, when crowds of young people gathered to oust President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the country’s dictator of three decades. For once, it seemed that a popular revolution in an Arab country might succeed. Artists flourished. Politics opened up. Western governments offered to cancel billions of dollars in debt. Al-Bashir went to jail, convicted on corruption charges. Those dreams were dashed after just two years, in 2021, when Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, unwilling to cede power to civilians, united to overthrow the government in a coup. But the alliance was short-lived. The coup leaders — the army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the R.S.F. commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan — fell out over how to merge their forces. Then they went to war. A surprise war When the first shots rang out on the streets of the capital, Khartoum, in April 2023, many residents figured it wouldn’t last long. Sudan had experienced dozens of coups, more than any country in Africa, since it won independence in 1956. Most were short-lived and bloodless. But the military found that the R.S.F., a force it had once helped to create, was now a formidable adversary with fighters more battle-hardened than its own forces. By December, the R.S.F. had seized most of Khartoum and the country’s breadbasket region, Jazeera State, as well as much of Darfur, the western region that suffered a genocide two decades earlier. General Hamdan, the R.S.F. leader, claims to be fighting for Sudan’s marginalized and has sought to distance his force from its roots in the Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s. But his lofty speeches are at odds with the massacres, rape and ethnic violence that human rights groups say his fighters commit. The Sudanese military is also guilty of war crimes, U.S. officials say, including indiscriminate bombing and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Sudanese refugees in Chad. Ivor Prickett for The New York Times Rising stakes Because Sudan is such a huge and populous country, the number of people who may starve is staggering. According to the latest estimates, 26 million people — over half the population — are suffering crisis levels of hunger. On Aug. 1, two groups of global hunger experts declared famine at a camp in Darfur, the world’s first since 2020. Other parts of the country may soon follow, they say. The conflict also brings political risk. It could spread to Sudan’s weak neighbors, like Chad or South Sudan. European leaders fear an influx of refugees. American intelligence worries that a lawless Sudan could become a terrorist haven. Other foreign powers are already involved in the conflict, choosing sides and providing weapons that ravage civilian neighborhoods. The United Arab Emirates has armed the R.S.F. Iran supplied drones to the military. Russia, over the course of the war, has backed both sides. The American-led peace talks that started in Geneva yesterday seem like a long shot — Sudan’s military didn’t even send a team of negotiators. But officials alarmed by the spiraling hunger crisis say there is little choice but to try. Millions of lives could be on the line. For more The war has transformed Khartoum, once a city of high rises and five-star hotels, into a battleground. Videos and satellite images show just how much destruction the war has brought. For The Times Magazine, Nicholas Casey embedded with a Sudanese militia that says it’s fighting to establish a Western-style democracy. THE LATEST NEWS 2024 Election Donald Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times During a speech in North Carolina, Donald Trump directed a series of insults at Kamala Harris, claiming she had “the laugh of a crazy person.” Trump criticized the Affordable Care Act but said he would leave it in place “unless we can do something much better.” He also promised tariffs of up to 20 percent on U.S. trading partners. Tim Walz, a hunter and a veteran, was a small-town gun guy. The Parkland school shooting helped turn him into a gun-control advocate. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to meet with Harris to discuss endorsing her in exchange for a cabinet post. Jesse Ventura, the former Minnesota governor and professional wrestler, endorsed Harris. Hulk Hogan, a onetime rival in the ring, has endorsed Trump. Walz met his wife, Gwen, when they taught at the same Nebraska high school. Friends describe her as coolheaded and competent. More on Politics Nancy Pelosi helped push President Biden out of the 2024 race. It’s chilled their five-decade friendship. Speaking to online content creators at the White House, Biden joked that he was “looking for a job.” U.S. Economy Karl Russell Last month, inflation in the U.S. dropped below 3 percent a year for the first time since 2021, putting the Federal Reserve on track to cut interest rates in September. Many prices fell from June to July, including for cars, clothes and plane tickets. Car insurance and rent got more expensive. Asked by a reporter whether the U.S. had “beat” inflation, Biden said yes: “My policies are working.” Israel-Hamas War Senior U.S. officials said Israel had achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza and that continued bombings would only increase risks to civilians. The Times spent weeks with freed Israeli hostages, photographing them as they try to rebuild their lives. See the images. Columbia University’s president quit. She’s the third Ivy League president to resign after criticism over the handling of Gaza protests on campus. War in Ukraine Russian medics at a field hospital in the Kursk region. Anatoliy Zhdanov/Kommersant Photo, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Ukraine’s military advanced even deeper into Russian territory. Russia withdrew some troops from Ukraine to combat the incursion. More than 130,000 Russians have fled or been evacuated. It’s a new phase of uncertainty for a country that had largely adapted to the war. Germany issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man it suspects of helping sabotage the Nord Stream pipeline in 2022. Other Big Stories In Tehama County, Calif. Noah Berger/Associated Press Over the past decade, some counties in Northern California have seen half their land burn. Hurricane Ernesto cut power for hundreds of thousands of people in Puerto Rico. The World Health Organization declared a global emergency over the spread of mpox in Africa. The disease, formerly called monkeypox, has killed more than 500 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo this year. A New Zealand charity accidentally gave away hundreds of chunks of meth. They had been disguised as candies. Even as Trump distances himself from abortion bans, conservative Christians aim to restrict abortion from conception and limit access to I.V.F. with or without him. Opinions Ukraine’s incursion into Russia is a serious risk, but also a real opportunity to expose Russia’s vulnerabilities, David French writes. Saving Caribbean coral reefs may require freezing their eggs and sperm, Carly Kenkel argues. Here are columns by Charles Blow on Trump’s sexism and Pamela Paul on the end of summer. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS In Copenhagen. Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times Scandinavian style: At Copenhagen Fashion Week, outfits on and off the runway matched the host country’s reputation as one of the happiest places in the world. Homesteaders: They’re living off the grid and posting about it online. Old Timer: The survival of the world’s oldest known humpback whale is a mystery. Youth: Growing up is hard. Global trends like climate change and job insecurity seem to be making it harder. Lives Lived: Wally Amos used his background as a talent agent, his aunt’s recipe and a winning personality to build the Famous Amos cookie brand. He died at 88. SPORTS M.L.B.: The New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge hit his 300th career home run in a win over the Chicago White Sox. He’s the fastest player to the milestone in the league’s history. Gymnastics: The court presiding over Jordan Chiles’s bronze medal case blamed gymnastics’ global governing body for problems at the Olympic floor exercise final. N.F.L.: The New England Patriots traded the veteran pass rusher Matthew Judon to the Atlanta Falcons in exchange for a third-round pick. ARTS AND IDEAS Ma Long, captain of the Chinese men’s table tennis team. VCG, via Reuters After an impressive run at the Paris Olympics, Chinese athletes are finding a darker side of that success: Extreme fans have mobbed them at airports and staked out their homes. Their experience is not uncommon in China, Vivian Wang writes, where intense fan culture often leads people to stalk their idols and sell their personal information. Read more about the phenomenon. More on culture The eighth piece in Banksy’s animal series. Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The street artist Banksy has unveiled animal artworks around London for nine straight days, sending fans on a citywide scavenger hunt. On late night, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert both discussed JD Vance. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Shuck corn for this basic chowder. Avoid these debunked health trends. Sip a nonalcoholic wine that’s actually good. Convert to compression socks. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was motivator. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. P.S. “The Wirecutter Show,” a weekly podcast from Wirecutter, launches next week. Listen to the trailer. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 17, 2024 Author Members Posted August 17, 2024 August 16, 2024 Good morning. We’re covering the Gaza cease-fire talks — as well as the 2024 campaigns, drug prices and Shen Yun. At a demonstration in Tel Aviv. Amir Levy/Getty Images Deal or no deal By Julian E. Barnes I cover international security issues. For weeks, the White House said the stars were aligned for a cease-fire agreement that would free the hostages held in Gaza. The framework of a deal first announced by President Biden has been in place since July. Since then, a phalanx of American officials has traveled frequently to the region, pushing Israel and Hamas to sign on. So far, they have failed. The last time I wrote this newsletter about the hostage talks, at the start of May, U.S. officials were describing Hamas as the holdout. (Israel had just made a major concession, dropping a demand to maintain checkpoints inside Gaza.) But by early last month, Hamas had shifted its position, made some concessions and signaled it was ready to move forward. Now, Washington sees Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as the chief obstacle to a deal. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how the script flipped. The stars align It’s an ideal time for Hamas to strike a bargain. The group is not destroyed and retains some military strength. But it is broken and severely weakened. Thousands of fighters are dead. Top commanders have been killed. Its leader, Yahya Sinwar, is isolated from other Hamas leaders. By some accounts, Gazan frustration with Hamas is growing. The group has even agreed to give up civilian control of Gaza, a sign it is ready to make concessions. In northern Gaza. Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Hamas officials, angered by Israel’s recent assassination of a political leader and negotiator, have said they won’t participate in the latest talks, which began yesterday. But American officials think that position will change, and Hamas appears willing to meet with Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Additionally, there appears to be little more that Israel can accomplish militarily. Hardly any part of Gaza is untouched by Israeli bombs. Military operations are now games of Whac-a-Mole against Hamas fighters who disappear easily into the population. American officials say Israel reaps diminishing returns: The remaining Hamas fighters are harder to hit, but Palestinian civilians — devastated by the war — bear ever-heavier burdens. The local health ministry says 40,005 Gazans, both civilians and combatants, have already been killed. Israeli defense officials concede that Netanyahu cannot realize his goal of wiping out Hamas. They believe diplomacy is the only way to bring home the roughly 115 living and dead hostages still held in Gaza. While daring military operations have rescued seven hostages, negotiations have freed more than 100. Those who remain alive in Gaza appear to be beyond the reach of Israeli commandos, many likely hidden deep in tunnels and used as human shields to protect Hamas leaders. The holdup But Netanyahu seems unready for a permanent cease-fire. American officials had hoped he would conclude an agreement after his speech to Congress last month. Instead, my colleagues have chronicled how Netanyahu imposed new cease-fire conditions: He wants Israel to keep control of Gaza’s southern border and has partially revived demands to screen Palestinians for weapons before they can return to their homes in the north — points negotiators thought Israel had already conceded. By The New York Times One reason may be political. Centrists have left the government, and a cease-fire agreement could break his right-wing coalition. When Netanyahu’s defense minister — a hawkish member of his own party — said “total victory” was unrealistic, the prime minister flayed him for adopting an “anti-Israel narrative.” Even if Netanyahu’s coalition held, an end to the war would intensify calls for a new election. After the Oct. 7 attack exposed security failures, it’s hard to imagine that Israeli voters will return Netanyahu to power. Delay might also allow Israeli forces to kill Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 terror attack, delivering a major victory for Netanyahu and potentially a dose of redemption. If the negotiations drag on long enough, it’s even possible Donald Trump will return to the White House and change the U.S. stance to align more closely with Netanyahu. The costs of delay This strategy is risky. Already, at least 40 hostages have died in captivity. There are doubts about how much longer those still alive can survive. And making a deal quickly holds the possibility — however slim — that Iran and Hezbollah might refrain from retaliating for Israel’s recent assassinations. Of course, it is Hamas that started this war by attacking Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking hostages back to Gaza. And at important moments when a deal was at hand, the group rejected it. It is possible that once Netanyahu is ready for an agreement, Hamas will, once more, back away. But American officials believe the group is ready to cede a measure of power in return for a cease-fire and, crucially, a path to a Palestinian state. If Netanyahu is not ready for closure, Israel will miss the opportunity to halt the fighting, and some hostages may never return home. The tragedy of the war will only grow. More on the Middle East “I will support Israel’s right to win its war on terror,” Trump said at his New Jersey golf club. Earlier, he said he’d told Netanyahu to end the war quickly because “the killing has to stop.” Trump falsely accused Kamala Harris of supporting an arms embargo on Israel, saying “Israel will be gone” if she wins. He said Chuck Schumer — the Senate Democratic leader, who is Jewish — was “like a Palestinian.” Israeli settlers attacked a village in the West Bank, setting fire to vehicles and hurling Molotov cocktails, the Israeli military said. The Palestinian Authority said one person was shot dead. The Lebanese militia Hezbollah is yet to retaliate against Israel for the assassination of one of its commanders. It is assessing the risk of a backlash at home. THE LATEST NEWS Republican Campaign At a press conference, Trump said he was “entitled to personal attacks” against Harris. “I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence,” he added. Trump’s lawyers asked the judge in his Manhattan criminal trial to delay sentencing until after the election. Trump’s latest financial disclosure shows he made $300,000 for endorsing a Bible and has about $100 million in liabilities from civil lawsuits he lost. Trump’s campaign hired one of his 2016 campaign managers, Corey Lewandowski, who has been accused of sexual harassment, as an adviser. Vance and Tim Walz agreed to debate on Oct. 1 on CBS. Democratic Campaign Biden still believes he could have beaten Trump, but the prospect of a brutal fight inside the Democratic Party persuaded him to quit the race. Here’s how he decided. “Mind your own damn business!” Harris and Walz are leaning into patriotic and limited-government rhetoric, accusing Republicans of seeking to restrict freedoms. Harris plans to blame corporate price gouging for high grocery costs. Here’s what economists say. North Carolina Democrats say Harris could win there. Republicans have held the state in all but one presidential election since 1980. Drug Prices President Biden and Vice President Harris. Eric Lee/The New York Times Biden and Harris announced lower Medicare prices for 10 prescription drugs, the first result of negotiations with pharmaceutical companies under a law the administration passed. The drugs include treatments for blood clots, diabetes and arthritis. See the full list and the new prices. The event was Biden’s first joint appearance with Harris since he ended his re-election bid. “She’s gonna make one hell of a president,” he said. War in Ukraine Ukrainian troops have taken full control of Sudzha, a town about six miles beyond the Russian border, Volodymyr Zelensky said. Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia is likely to make it harder for the Kremlin to renew its offensive in Ukraine’s east, U.S. officials believe. But its forces are already closing in on one strategic town there. More International News Medical students and doctors protesting in Kolkata, India. Piyal Adhikary/EPA, via Shutterstock The death and apparent rape of a female trainee physician at a hospital in Kolkata has fueled protests across India. Sweden recorded a case of mpox, the first outside Africa during the current outbreak. Read what to know about the virus. Typhoon Ampil dumped heavy rain on the greater Tokyo area, flooding some streets and forcing evacuations. Thailand’s Parliament chose a 37-year-old heir of a political dynasty as prime minister, days after a court ousted the previous one. Other Big Stories A Shen Yun advertisement. The New York Times Shen Yun, a dance show by the persecuted Chinese religious movement Falun Gong, has earned millions across five continents. But performers say the group has been abusive, often discouraging dancers and musicians from seeking medical care. Federal prosecutors have subpoenaed Mayor Eric Adams of New York and his 2021 campaign as part of a corruption investigation. Gov. Philip Murphy of New Jersey picked his former chief of staff to succeed Senator Bob Menendez, who is resigning after a jury convicted him of corruption. Opinions Doug Sosnik presents 14 maps to show how Harris upended the race and consolidated Democratic support. Hunter Biden is an unregistered foreign agent, and he needs to be charged as one, Casey Michel argues. Readers objected to the editorial board’s decision to stop endorsing New York candidates. Here’s a column by David Brooks on understanding emotions. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Ash Adams for The New York Times Precious cargo: In Utqiagvik, Alaska — the northernmost city in the U.S. — everything arrives by plane. But flying there can be treacherous. Mystery of the mind: Many people in vegetative states may be capable of thought, a new study suggests. “All-American spread”: How the British learned to stop worrying and love peanut butter. Lives Lived: Peter Marshall once claimed that “The Hollywood Squares” hired him as host because its producers wanted “a complete nonentity.” He turned out to be the perfect straight man, asking serious questions and coaxing cheeky rejoinders from celebrities. Marshall died at 98. SPORTS N.F.L.: The Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots 14-13 in a preseason game. The Patriots’ rookie quarterback, Drake Maye, improved in his second outing. Media: ESPN fired the former N.F.L. player Robert Griffin III, as well as the “Sunday N.F.L. Countdown” host Samantha Ponder, in a move said to have been made for financial reasons. ARTS AND IDEAS In Rio de Janeiro. Maria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York Times In Brazil, a debate is roiling over maid’s rooms, the cramped quarters that housed domestic workers in Brazilian homes for generations. The rooms originated with slavery but remained popular even after abolition, when affluent families employed Black domestic workers who toiled round the clock for little or no money. Some Brazilians still use them for live-in workers, though many others are transforming the rooms into libraries, lounges and walk-in closets. More on culture Photo illustration by Celina Pereira Embrace your summer dad bod. These movies show how. The authorities charged five people with providing the ketamine that caused Matthew Perry’s death, including his personal assistant and two doctors. The late night hosts discussed Trump’s use of Tic Tacs to discuss prices: “If someone hands you a breath mint, they’re not suggesting you talk about inflation.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … David Malosh for The New York Times Top one-pan pesto beans with toasted nuts and Parmesan. Commute with a great laptop backpack. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was publicly. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 18, 2024 Author Members Posted August 18, 2024 August 17, 2024 Good morning. Today, we’re looking back on one of the great years in cinema history. We’re also covering Kamala Harris’s economic agenda and fall fashion trends. Laurence Fishburne, in a scene from “The Matrix.” Our futuristic past By Alissa Wilkinson Film critic Do you remember 1999? The vibes were peculiar. On the one hand, politicians and pundits talked ceaselessly about “building a bridge to the 21st century” and entering the new millennium (even though technically it wouldn’t start till 2001). On the other hand, fear lurked around all corners, mostly thanks to new technologies. The internet was still a place you wouldn’t dare use your real name, for reasons that were never totally clear. And the much-hyped Y2K bug left a lot of us wondering if society as we knew it was about to end because of faulty computer code, or something. (I recommend the delightful documentary “Time Bomb Y2K” for reliving that weird moment.) That collective mood — one of hope and fear mashed together — made 1999 an incredible year at the movies. Just look at the list: “Fight Club.” “The Matrix.” “Toy Story 2.” “Eyes Wide Shut.” “Office Space.” “Shakespeare in Love.” “Magnolia.” “The Green Mile.” “The Blair Witch Project.” “Being John Malkovich.” “The Virgin Suicides.” There’s a feeling of danger in a lot of these movies, alongside a fixation on sex appeal and youthful ennui. You could go down to the movie theater and see a great rom-com like “You’ve Got Mail,” “Runaway Bride” or “Notting Hill,” a teen classic like “10 Things I Hate About You” or “American Pie,” a campy horror adventure like “The Mummy” or a sexy take on a classic novel like “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which has one of the best casts of all time. It’s striking to see how many of these movies are still beloved by both audiences and critics. Some of that has to do with eccentric creative visions. In 1999, studios still took chances on very peculiar movies instead of leaning on blandly imagined sequels to rake in megabucks. Yes, unsurprisingly, “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” ruled the box office. But the No. 2 film of the year was “The Sixth Sense,” from M. Night Shyamalan, which introduced a new and exciting voice through a totally new story. There are other factors, too: 1999 was an inflection point in the industry, in which venerable masters like Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese were working alongside young upstarts like Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and the Wachowskis. And though we weren’t yet living in a world in which everyone carried a high-definition video camera in their pocket, recording technology was becoming cheaper, lighter and more accessible. That meant you could start shooting a movie like “The Blair Witch Project” with a paltry $35,000 in your pocket and turn it into $250 million. Over on The Times’s Culture desk, we’ve been talking about 1999 all year. Our “Class of 1999” series examines some of the movies, celebrities and ideas that emerged a quarter-century ago, and how they remain significant today. I kicked off the series by writing about how the opening scene in “The Matrix” proved remarkably prescient. My colleague Maya Salam had a fascinating essay on how “The Blair Witch Project” foreshadowed our age of misinformation. Melena Ryzik profiled the breakout star of “The Sixth Sense,” Haley Joel Osment, and his post-child-star career. What’s been amazing about revisiting the films of 1999 is realizing that, for as much as the world has changed, a lot has stayed the same. Looking at a few of this year’s biggest movies — “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” “Twisters,” “A Quiet Place: Day One” — I think that mix of optimism and fear set the tone for the 21st century more than any of us expected. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV Gena Rowlands in 2014. Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated Press The actress Gena Rowlands, known for her vulnerable portraits of women in states of crisis, died at 94. Read her obituary, and stream some of her best performances, including “The Notebook” and 1968’s “Faces.” John Cena and Awkwafina star in the movie “Jackpot!” It is one of eight movies our critics are talking about this week. Paramount — the parent company of CBS and Nickelodeon — started a series of long-scheduled layoffs that will cut its U.S. staff by around 15 percent. Jay Kanter, who served as an agent to stars including Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, died at 97. Music The influential rapper Missy Elliott is headlining a tour for the first time in three decades. Jon Caramanica called the show a “relentless and exhilarating 75 minutes.” Taylor Swift fans gathered at London’s Wembley Stadium for the first Eras show since a terrorist plot caused three concerts to be canceled in Vienna. Barack Obama revealed his annual summer playlist. This year’s list includes Charli XCX and Tems, Pitchfork reports. Other Culture News A party at the Loft, a nightclub on Martha’s Vineyard. Gabriela Herman for The New York Times An intimate film festival on Martha’s Vineyard drew celebrities and politicians including Taraji P. Henson, Don Cheadle and Senator Cory Booker. See inside the festival — and the parties. Paula Modersohn-Becker was a trailblazing German artist who died in 1907. In her first American museum show, her work looks “unmistakably modern,” our critic writes. Fans have speculated for months over whether Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are headed for divorce. The Cut created a timeline of the rumors. A set of proposed Biden administration policies could make it easier for consumers to cancel subscriptions. Burning Man has sold out every year since 2011. But this year, after two consecutive festivals marred by bad weather, tickets are moving more slowly. Former football players — strong, agile and fast — often make good NASCAR pit crew members. Racing teams are scouring college campuses to hire them. “Shoot me up with a big one”: Court papers show the desperate final weeks leading up to the actor Matthew Perry’s death from ketamine. THE LATEST NEWS 2024 Election Kamala Harris at a rally yesterday in Raleigh, N.C. Erin Schaff/The New York Times Kamala Harris laid out an economic agenda focused on bringing down the cost of living, pledging at a North Carolina rally to advance “economic security, stability and dignity” for the middle class. Harris’s plans call for building more housing, subsidizing first-time home buyers and increased tax credits for parents. She also said she would expand President Biden’s policies lowering drug prices. Harris also criticized Donald Trump’s proposed trade tariff hikes, calling them “in effect, a national sales tax” that would raise prices. Trump has likened Harris’s economic policies to “something straight out of Venezuela or the Soviet Union.” Other Big Stories The U.S., Egypt and Qatar presented Israel and Hamas with a “bridging proposal” in an effort to reach a cease-fire deal to end the war in Gaza. Negotiations will continue next week. Iran appears to be delaying any retaliation against Israel for the assassination of a top Hamas leader to let the cease-fire negotiations continue. Russian troops are closing in on Pokrovsk, a strategic Ukrainian-held town in the eastern Donetsk region. Taking it would bring Russia closer to its goal of seizing the region. The Supreme Court continued to block, for now, Biden administration rules meant to protect transgender students in Republican states. A Florida jury found a white woman guilty of manslaughter after she shot her unarmed Black neighbor through her door. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. CULTURE CALENDAR By Andrew LaVallee 👽 “Alien: Romulus” (out now): Real talk, I watch Aliens movies the way Hezly Rivera’s dad watches her compete on the balance beam. The latest installment stars Cailee Spaeny as a Sigourney Weaver-esque heroine. And it features the creatures you came for, as Manohla Dargis puts it, “scuttling and scurrying and causing their usual gory mayhem.” ❤️🔥 “Love Island U.S.A.” (Monday): This dating show, set in Fiji, was the guilty pleasure of the summer. Cast members return on Monday for the reunion special, so if you want to go in prepared, this weekend is a perfect time to binge the 30-plus episodes (and to read our interview with two who shared a special bromance.) RECIPE OF THE WEEK Ryan Liebe for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Antipasto salad The end of summer is peak no-cook recipe season, and Dan Pelosi’s tangy antipasto salad is one of the most satisfying things you can make without turning on the stove. A combination of Italian deli favorites like chunks of salami, marinated artichoke hearts, roasted peppers and provolone cheese, this hearty mix is lightened by juicy ripe cherry tomatoes along with fresh basil and parsley. Dan also adds a can of butter beans, but if you can’t find them, canned chickpeas work just as well. For the best flavor, let the salad sit in the fridge for at least an hour before serving; this gives it — and the cook — ample time to chill before dinner. T MAGAZINE Photograph by Collier Schorr. Styled by Raphael Hirsch Click the image above to read this weekend’s issue of T, The Times’s style magazine. REAL ESTATE Susan Quillin, left, and Jean Nelsen with Poppy. Drew Kelly for The New York Times The Hunt: After six years in Palm Springs, a retired couple wanted a three-bedroom house in the Bay Area for under $1 million. Which did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $280,000: A bungalow with three bedrooms in Minneapolis; a 1920 Craftsman-style house in Pittsburgh; or a Cape Cod-style cottage in Hagerstown, Md. LIVING Kelly Wearstler at home in Beverly Hills. Teal Thomsen for The New York Times So you’ve framed your art? Here’s how to hang a gallery wall. Fall fashion: Crisp, timeless silhouettes and kitten heels. Frugal Traveler: Driving solo (and on a budget) from Nova Scotia to Montreal. “Cucumber guy”: This TikTok creator shows the many ways to eat the vegetable. Painless pap smears: The F.D.A. recently approved a test that allows women to collect their own samples to screen for cervical cancer, no speculum required. Trends: Wearing shorts to a wedding is no longer forbidden. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER The secret to a perfect smash burger When it comes to burgers, I like them one way: smashed. The ultrathin patty offers a wider platform for toppings and maximizes umami flavor. But achieving the perfect smash is easy if — and only if — you have the right equipment. After much trial and error, I’ve found that a stainless steel grill press is the best tool for the job. And it’s not just great for burgers. Use it to make evenly toasted grilled cheeses, griddled cinnamon rolls, crispy asparagus spears, smashed mini potatoes and more. — Maki Yazawas GAME OF THE WEEK Aaron Judge Erin Hooley/Associated Press New York Yankees vs. Detroit Tigers, M.L.B.: Comparisons to Babe Ruth can feel like sacrilege to baseball fans — especially Yankees fans — but Aaron Judge has earned it. Judge hit his 300th career home run this week, and he did so faster than anyone in baseball history. In fact, he broke two records, hitting 300 in the fewest games (surpassing Ralph Kiner) and the fewest at-bats (surpassing Ruth). The Yankees are having a great season, thanks not only to Judge but also to Juan Soto, who bats just before him in the lineup. One jaw-dropping stat, via The Athletic’s Chris Kirschner: Judge and Soto are the most productive Yankees duo since Ruth and Lou Gehrig in 1927. Tomorrow at 7 p.m. on ESPN NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was laboratory. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 18, 2024 Author Members Posted August 18, 2024 August 18, 2024 Good morning. Today, we’re covering a sharp downturn in the art market, as well as Biden’s presidency, Ukraine and trendy funeral homes. Amani Lewis with the painting “Galatians 6:2 — the carriers.” Ysa Pérez for The New York Times Art depreciation By Zachary Small I cover the worlds of art and money. As art became a serious business over the last few decades, with record multimillion-dollar sales eclipsing one another, it seemed as though values could just rise in perpetuity. But this year has been a reality check. High-end art sales have slumped. Sellers have withdrawn prominent works from major auctions at the last minute, for fear of jeopardizing artists’ markets. More than a dozen galleries have closed in Manhattan. Layoffs have begun to creep through the $65 billion industry, as one of its largest companies, Christie’s, saw revenue plunge. It took in $2.1 billion from auctions in the first six months of this year, down from $4.1 billion during the same period in 2022. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explore some reasons the art business has slowed, and how it’s affecting a rising generation of artists. The high point Jaws dropped on a November evening in 2022, when collectors bought a record $1.5 billion worth of paintings in a single night at the Christie’s auction house. Buyers snapped up a parade of masterpieces by artists including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Gustav Klimt — all from the collection of the Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. That frenzied night seemed to forecast a booming future for an industry that had been getting hotter by the year. But it actually marked the peak of the market. High interest rates and inflation bear some responsibility for the slowdown. Collectors who view artworks as financial assets have flinched at the rising costs of doing business and the diminished ability to get favorable loans to buy paintings they hope will appreciate in value. The supply of modern masterpieces has also decreased as potential sellers sit on their investments until economic conditions improve for the ultrawealthy. Hesitation breeds uncertainty and doubt — dangerous emotions in an industry prone to mood swings. The more collectors fear a downturn, the more likely it becomes. Allison Zuckerman’s “Woman With Her Pet.” Allison Zuckerman Studio and Kravets Wehby Gallery A pipeline problem You could be excused for thinking the art world was still flying high. A jet-set crowd of wealthy collectors and influencers has shuttled around the world this summer from Venetian palazzos to Swiss chalets, stopping to party in Tokyo before ending their grand tour in the mountains of Aspen, Colo., for an art fair where participants enjoyed cocktails at a home decorated with an Ed Ruscha painting of the Rocky Mountains that boldly exclaims, “IT’S RIDICULOUS.” When you’ve been to enough of these fancy shindigs, you start to notice who’s missing: young artists. Four months ago, I started compiling a list of promising artists who found market success early — many in their mid-20s and fresh out of graduate school. Collectors had purchased their still-wet paintings during the pandemic and flipped them for profit at auction months later. The pictures often sold for six or seven times their estimates at auction, fetching $150,000, $200,000 and sometimes more. Decades ago, this kind of speculation could get a collector blacklisted in the art world. Artists and dealers wanted to create stable markets, steadily build careers and attract museums that would add their works to collections. But as the wealthy began to use paintings as investments, speculators flooded the market. The market for young artists reached its peak in 2021, when collectors spent nearly $712 million on their works at auction. Last year, the market lost nearly a third of its value — and it continues to shrink. In the first half of this year, sales for this group dropped another 39 percent. The calamitous fall My colleague Julia Halperin and I spoke with a group of devastated younger artists. Powerless to stop these auctions, some watched in tears as the markets for their works declined. One painting, by the Ghanaian artist Emmanuel Taku, sold at auction in 2021 for $189,000. When it was put up for auction again earlier this year, its price plunged to just $10,160. “You are buying a piece of my life — a little history of me and my people,” said the artist Amani Lewis, whose income fell by about 75 percent as the auction world’s failures rippled into studios and galleries, where artists make most of their sales. Those who have experienced the churn hope it’s made them stronger. But they also remain frustrated by a system that treats paintings as commodities for speculation. THE LATEST NEWS Democratic Campaign President Biden served as a senator for many years. Shepard Sherbell/Corbis, via Getty Images President Biden sought the presidency nearly all of his life. When he finally got there, it brought out his best — and eventually his worst, Robert Draper writes for The Times Magazine. Kamala Harris has not often had a chance to lead on signature issues as vice president. But she has found roles to play on abortion and gun safety. Read about her time in office. Harris is now in contention in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, not long after Donald Trump was on track to run away with them, according to Times and Siena College polls. Harris’s network of confidants is younger and more racially diverse than Biden’s. Republican Campaign Trump veered into personal attacks against Harris in a Pennsylvania rally meant to be framed around economic policy. Trump has signaled that he wants use the military for domestic law enforcement. It could have implications for civil liberties. The former president has tried to wrest attention from Harris with a media blitz that has included an interview with Elon Musk and calling into a New York drive-time radio show. War in Ukraine Russian prisoners of war in a Ukrainian prison cell. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times In interviews, Russian conscripts recalled abandoning their positions or surrendering during Ukraine’s incursion into Russia. Ukraine has destroyed a critical bridge in Russia’s Kursk region as it tries to sever Russian supply lines. More International News In Caracas, Venezuela. The New York Times Venezuelans are mourning those killed in post-election unrest — and the remnants of their nation’s democracy. “We escaped death”: During an attack on a village in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers, a family said they fled just as the settlers reached their front door. An Israeli airstrike hit a factory in a town in southern Lebanon, killing at least 10 civilians, Lebanese officials said. Internationally, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy has mostly presented herself as pragmatic. At home, she asserts a conservative stance on issues including gay rights. Other Big Stories George Santos, the former Republican congressman, told prosecutors that he intended to plead guilty and avoid a federal trial. The fall of Roe v. Wade pushed many abortion clinics to expand to other markets. Some have found that blue states can be as hostile as red ones. A judge blocked Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery from forming a joint sports-focused streaming service, saying the venture could make the sports viewership market less competitive. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Is Ukraine’s incursion into Russia effective? Yes. The surprise offensive is likely to be traumatic for Russia, whose forces appear to have been stretched thin. “The longer Ukraine holds on to the Kursk region, the more likely it is that Putin will see no alternative but to negotiate with Kyiv,” Dov Zakheim writes for The Hill. No. Without more proactive support from the West, Ukraine’s incursion has limited success. “However jolting or embarrassing this has been for the Kremlin, it’s unlikely to spark Putin’s downfall,” Politico Europe’s Jamie Dettmer writes. FROM OPINION Josh Shapiro lost the race to be Harris’s running mate, at least in part, because he’s Jewish. It doesn’t bode well for future Jewish participation in Democratic politics, James Kirchick argues. Trump isn’t funny anymore, and it could lose him the election, Leif Weatherby argues. Here are columns by David French on student protests and Maureen Dowd on Democrats. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS A new kind of funeral home. Tom Jamieson for The New York Times Chicly departed: A small group of funeral homes offer a modern approach to death that feels personal — and looks good. A positive reaction: With purple gold and bouncy metal, a Canadian chemist shines on YouTube. Routine: How a Brooklyn business owner and foodie spends her Sundays. Vows: She got kicked out of Canada. Their story didn’t end there. Lives Lived: Leonard Hayflick was a biomedical researcher who discovered that normal cells can divide only a certain number of times, setting a limit on the human life span. He died at 96. THE INTERVIEW Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By David Marchese This week’s subject for The Interview is the singer Jelly Roll, who, before hitting it big in music, was in and out of prison starting as a teenager and has dealt with personal loss and substance-abuse issues. These life experiences, and the struggle to overcome them, inform Jelly Roll’s music — and comfort and inspire his many, many fans. I was sent eight or nine of your new songs. They’re about Jelly Roll subjects: addiction, adversity. Given that your life is in a better place, is it harder to come up with that kind of material? First of all, I hear these stories every night. I hear what the songs are doing for people. All of a sudden, what I thought was just my story becomes the story of tens of millions. It’s deeper than my story. This is my child’s mother’s story, who’s still actively in and out of jail and in her addiction. That’s how close this still is to my house, regardless of the size of my house. How have you talked with your kids about the period in your life when you were in and out of prison? I’ve always been honest. Bailee was different, my oldest, because of what her mother was dealing with. I was trying to describe what addiction was to an 8-year-old without using words like “addiction” or “drugs.” Is that possible? I believe that it’s a disease. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a drug addict really close to you. Have you? I have not. The strangest thing happens, man. Somebody you’ve known your entire life turns into a different person. I’ve had it happen to baby-mothers, cousins, biological brothers. It is unbelievable what it does. The way we tried to explain it is that your mother’s struggling with something, it’s a medical thing. Read more of the interview here. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Photograph by Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times. Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine. BOOKS Tom Wolfe in 1968. Sam Falk/The New York Times Tom Wolfe: How the author of classics like “The Right Stuff” turned sociology into art. By the Book: Yoko Ogawa loves finding love at the bookstore. Obituary: Betty Prashker was a top editor and executive at two publishing houses who published feminist classics. She died at 99. Quiz: Do you know these novels that were adapted into video games? Our editors’ picks: This week’s selections include “Practice,” a debut novel about an Oxford undergraduate and the thrill and boredom of academic life. Times best sellers: “The Art of Power,” Nancy Pelosi’s memoir, is a No. 1 debut on the hardcover nonfiction list. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Stream these horror movies. Listen to great songs recorded at Electric Lady Studios. Upgrade to a high-quality notebook. Make better cookies with a good scoop. THE WEEK AHEAD What to Watch For The Democratic National Convention begins tomorrow. A blue supermoon appears tomorrow. Emmanuel Macron is expected to meet with party leaders on Friday to discuss forming a new government in France. Meal Plan Christopher Testani for The New York Times Are you a zucchini skeptic? In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Ali Slagle shares recipes that have helped her appreciate the abundant vegetable, including a Kerala-style vegetable korma, yakitori-style skewers and a cold noodle salad. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was divulging. Can you put eight historical events — including the discovery of Antarctica, the first peace treaty, and the creation of Pac-Man — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 19, 2024 Author Members Posted August 19, 2024 August 19, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering the start of the Democratic convention — as well as House Republicans, flash floods and hate-watching. At a rally in Philadelphia. Erin Schaff/The New York Times Progressive patriotism At her first rally with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris delivered a riff about their quintessentially American backgrounds. She grew up in Oakland, Calif., raised by a working mother, while he grew up on the Nebraska plains, she explained. They were “two middle-class kids,” she said, now trying to make it to the White House together. “Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” This sort of unabashed patriotism doesn’t always come naturally to today’s Democratic Party. But it has been central to Harris’s presidential campaign. In her ads and speeches, she portrays herself as a tough, populist, progressive patriot. It has made a difference, too. Harris has persuaded — for now, at least — a meaningful slice of swing voters that she is not the out-of-touch California liberal who Republicans claim she is. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she has surged ahead of Donald Trump partly because she is performing better with working-class voters and rural voters than President Biden was (even before his disastrous debate), according to Times/Siena College polls. Across both the Midwest and Sun Belt swing states, she is faring better with independents. Today is my first newsletter after an August break, and I am struck by how much Harris’s message has revolved around progressive patriotism over the past couple weeks. With the Democratic convention about to begin, I’ll explain why you can expect to hear more of this theme from Harris and Walz. Who’s patriotic? I know that many Democrats already consider their party to be the patriotic one. Republican protesters, after all, were the ones who violently attacked Congress in 2021, and Donald Trump regularly portrays modern America as a hellscape. But it also the case that Republicans are more comfortable with many expressions of patriotism than Democrats are. Republican voters are much more likely to describe themselves as “very patriotic” than Democratic voters are, according to YouGov polls. And Republicans are more likely than Democrats — especially highly educated Democrats — to say that the United States is the world’s greatest country: Source: New York Times/Siena College poll, Sept. 2022 | By The New York Times Given all this, it’s not surprising that most voters consider the Republican Party to be the more patriotic one: Source: YouGov April 2024 poll | By The New York Times The far left plays a role here. Parts of it — think of Noam Chomsky — can be disdainful of the U.S., describing it as a fundamentally oppressive country. Liberals, not conservatives, tend to argue that immigrants are forced to move here because of the consequences of American imperialism. Liberals are more likely to have qualms about national institutions like Thanksgiving, the military or the flag. The most prominent left-wing movement of the past year — the Gaza protests — is a case study. The movement has not merely called attention to the high civilian death toll in Gaza; it sometimes portrays the war as an extension of U.S. immorality. Protesters have pulled down American flags and defaced a statue of George Washington with the word “genocidal.” The America-skeptical left isn’t the Democratic Party, of course. But the left does exacerbate many swing voters’ concerns about the party — namely, that it isn’t cleareyed about a dangerous world. These same swing voters generally don’t like Trump, but they do appreciate his apparent toughness on trade, immigration, crime and more. Harris’s shift Harris has devoted much of her early campaign to narrowing both her party’s toughness and patriotism deficits. Her stump speech is organized around the idea of fighting for “the promise of America,” and she has made clear that she’s willing to take on both the far left and far right. She excoriated Gaza protesters for burning a U.S. flag. She and Walz also cast themselves as defenders of liberty against Republicans who threaten it, especially on abortion rights. As my colleague Katie Glueck wrote, “Using traditionally right-leaning words and phrasing, they are portraying themselves as the true champions of universal American values.” Harris combines patriotism with muscular promises to defend the interests of ordinary Americans. “Being president is about who you fight for, and she’s fighting for people like you,” the narrator in a campaign ad says. Her ads explain that as a prosecutor, she took on murderers, child abusers, drug cartels, big banks and big drug companies. Harris’s flip-flop on immigration embodies both the toughness and patriotism themes. As a presidential candidate in 2019 — when the left was more influential in the Democratic Party — she favored decriminalizing border crossings. Today, she promises to protect Americans from gangs and fentanyl flowing across the border, and she criticizes Trump for blocking a border-security bill Kamala Harris Erin Schaff/The New York Times In part, Harris’s approach is an attempt to combat sexist stereotypes about strength. But gender isn’t the main explanation. Patriotism has long been a successful Democratic strategy, for both female and male candidates. The last three Democratic presidents — Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — all celebrated American ideals while acknowledging the country’s flaws. So have successful Democratic Senate candidates in purple and red states, like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Montana and Ohio. “We love our country,” Harris said in Philadelphia, with Walz standing behind her, “and I believe it is the highest form of patriotism to fight for the ideals of our country.” More on the convention The Democrats have allotted five speaking slots to social media influencers, an effort to reach voters who don’t typically consume traditional media. Large protests against the Biden-Harris administration’s approach to the war in Gaza are expected. Officials in Chicago say they’re prepared for demonstrations. Protest leaders describe plans for days of peaceful gatherings. At the 1968 Democratic convention there, violence erupted between the police and demonstrators protesting the Vietnam War. Read memories from the people who lived it. Democrats released their party platform. It mentioned Trump’s name 150 times and included familiar priorities like tax cuts for working families. THE LATEST NEWS More on the Election The Harris campaign has essentially chosen the most popular parts of Biden’s agenda, hoping that a younger messenger can sell them to Americans. An ABC poll showed Harris leading Trump in swing states, while a CBS poll showed them tied. See polling averages for five swing states here. JD Vance defended his past unsubstantiated claims that early waves of Italian, Irish and German immigration led to higher crime by citing the movie “Gangs of New York.” Some U.S. companies, concerned about potential increased tariffs on Chinese goods if Trump is elected, are stockpiling parts. Georgia’s election board now has a conservative majority who question the state’s 2020 results. They have new power to influence the 2024 results. More on Politics President Biden Pete Marovich for The New York Times House Republicans formally made the case for impeaching Biden, using circumstantial evidence to accuse him of corruption tied to his son’s business dealings. In Georgia, a statue of John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader, was installed in a space where a Confederate memorial had stood for more than 100 years. International Antony Blinken and Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog. Pool photo by Kevin Mohatt During a trip to Israel, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that recent negotiations had created one of the best chances for reaching a cease-fire in Gaza. “This is a decisive moment,” he said. Volodymyr Zelensky wants to hold Russian territory as leverage for future talks to end the war in Ukraine. In Moscow, many doubt that strategy. Thousands of Indian doctors refused to heed the government’s request to end protests over the rape and murder of a fellow medic, Reuters reports. A fire in Kuwait that killed 49 migrant workers, mostly from India, exposed the unsafe living conditions for low-paid migrants in the oil-rich nation. Other Big Stories Powerful storms caused flash flooding on Long Island. The same storm system dumped as much as 10 inches of rain on Connecticut on Sunday. See a video. Hurricane Ernesto threatens beachgoers on the East Coast with swells and rip currents. Elon Musk said he closed the X office in Brazil because a judge there ordered the company to suspend certain accounts. Opinions In 2014, ISIS brutally killed the journalist James Foley. Ten years later, Diane Foley, his mother, recalls her confrontation with one of his killers. The world’s over-dependence on China used to work. But as China’s economy slows, the global economy is now vulnerable to a debt crisis, Michael Beckley writes. Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss the Democratic National Convention. David French is an evangelical Christian conservative. But this November, for the first time in his life, he plans to vote for a Democrat for president. On a new episode of “The Opinions,” he explains why other conservatives should follow his lead. Listen to the episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on masculinity and the election and Ezra Klein on how Democrats and Republicans differ. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Mennonites from the colony of Providencia in Peru. Marco Garro for The New York Times Peru: These Mennonites — seeking inexpensive land away from modern life — are making the Amazon their home. Now (hate) watching: Why do so many of us watch shows we think are bad? Happiness: Take steps to bolster your drive to seek out positive emotions. Bungee jumping: Older adults are joining their grandchildren on travel adventures. Metropolitan Diary: A guide’s advice at the Met. Lives Lived: Alain Delon was a smoldering film star who worked with some of Europe’s most revered 20th-century directors. He died at 88. SPORTS W.N.B.A.: The Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark set the rookie record for assists in a season in a win over the Seattle Storm. Flag football: The U.S. national team quarterback Darrell “Housh” Doucette says he thinks “it’s disrespectful” for N.F.L. players to assume they will take Olympic spots when the sport debuts in 2028. ARTS AND IDEAS In California. Jim Wilson/The New York Times The U.S. still has a significant office vacancy rate — about 20 percent, according to one estimate — and downtown business districts are creating resort-like luxe spaces to compete with the comforts workers’ living rooms. One such complex in the Bay Area includes nine restaurants, outdoor work spaces, a golf-simulator and a calendar of community events. More on culture Cailee Spaeny in “Alien: Romulus.” 20th Century Studios “Alien: Romulus” was on pace to collect at least $42 million at the North American box office over the weekend, solidifying a turnaround at Disney’s movie division. A New York hospital system has allowed filmmakers to follow its workers and patients in recent years. Now, it’s starting a production company. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Linda Xiao for The New York Times Combine caramelized chunks of zucchini and tender shrimp for a simple sheet-pan meal. Buy the right water bottle for your kid. Find the best backpack for students. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was groundhog. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 20, 2024 Author Members Posted August 20, 2024 August 20, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering Biden’s convention speech — as well as Gaza cease-fire talks, Ukraine’s work force and Phil Donahue. President Biden and Jill Biden. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Biden’s legacy President Biden has never exactly been a liberal Democrat or a conservative Democrat. He has instead stayed in his party’s mainstream. When the party moved right in the 1990s, he moved with it. When it moved left in the 2010s, so did he. But Biden has not simply gone with the Democratic flow. Over his more than 50 years in politics, he has periodically shown strong opinions about how his party should change — and helped it do so. Last night in Chicago, Biden took a big step in his long political goodbye, delivering a 52-minute speech at the Democratic convention. In today’s newsletter, I’ll examine how Biden’s presidency shaped his party — and consider whether Kamala Harris is likely to continue these shifts. I think three points are key. 1. Biden’s neopopulism Biden has always understood the class resentments that many Americans feel. (If you haven’t read Robert Draper’s profile of Biden for The Times Magazine, I recommend it, including the section in which Biden analyzes George W. Bush.) Biden’s political career began in 1972, when he defeated an incumbent Republican senator in Delaware even as Richard Nixon won a landslide. Biden ran as a subtly different kind of Democrat, with a more working-class image than the party’s presidential nominee that year, George McGovern. Biden simultaneously distanced himself from the liberal fervor of the 1960s and portrayed himself as an economic populist. He criticized both draft dodgers and “millionaires who don’t pay any taxes at all.” Five decades later, Biden became the most populist Democratic president in modern times. This positioning wasn’t just about his background, either. Populism has recently gained a new appeal, thanks to the failure of the market-based economic policies of the past half-century — which are often known as neoliberalism — to deliver broad-based prosperity. Instead of focusing on trade deals, Biden tried to build up American manufacturing. He joined a picket line with autoworkers and appointed labor-friendly regulators. He gave Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices. He cracked down on “junk fees.” He tried to end decades of gentle antitrust regulation. Biden devoted much of his speech last night to this agenda. He claimed to have rebuilt “the backbone of the middle class.” He said, “We finally beat big Pharma,” and “Wall Street didn’t build America, the middle class built America.” When the crowd chanted, “Union Joe,” he replied, “I agree. I’m proud.” These economic policies are largely popular even though Biden is not. If the Democratic Party’s shift away from neoliberalism — toward what I’ve called neopopulism — continues, Biden’s presidency will be a major reason. And Harris’s initial economic proposals suggest that much of the shift will continue if she wins. At a picket outside a General Motors facility in Belleville, Mich. Pete Marovich for The New York Times 2. Bipartisanship lives Biden loves to talk about how he has proved his doubters wrong, sometimes with a dash or two of hyperbole. Yet there is at least one aspect of his presidency for which he deserves to gloat: his surprising success at passing bipartisan legislation. He has signed bipartisan bills on infrastructure, semiconductor chips, Ukraine aid and TikTok — as well as on anti-Asian hate crimes, the aviation system, the electoral process, gun violence, the Postal Service, same-sex marriage and veterans’ health. In a polarized Washington, Biden has demonstrated that bipartisanship remains possible. “Remember, we were told we couldn’t get it done?” he asked in last night’s speech. He drew on his long Senate career to help pass these bills. He refused to treat the Republican Party as the enemy and remained upbeat — and often in the background — even when negotiations stalled. Would Harris show similar patience? And would congressional Republicans be willing to work with her? It’s hard to know. 3. A new cold war Biden’s signature line about foreign policy is that the world is witnessing a struggle between democracy and autocracy. You can quibble with the details, but his basic point is correct. U.S. allies are mostly democracies — including Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Australia, Mexico and Canada. The countries that treat the U.S. as an enemy are autocracies — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Increasingly, these autocracies are collaborating with one another. Biden has defined the United States as the leading player in an alliance to combat autocracy. “Who can lead the world other than the United States of America?” he asked last night. As president, he confronted China economically and promised to defend Taiwan. He rallied a pro-Ukraine coalition after Russia invaded. He withdrew from Afghanistan — chaotically — partly because of its limited strategic importance. He abandoned his initial reluctance to work with Saudi Arabia, an autocratic ally, and embraced it as a counterweight to Iran. He continued to embrace Israel for similar reasons, despite the death and destruction in Gaza. Biden’s foreign policy is based on the idea that the world has entered a new cold war (even if he rejects the term). And Harris? Her campaign has said little about foreign policy or her worldview. Maybe that will start to change in Chicago this week. Joe Biden announces his candidacy for president in 1987. Keith Meyers/The New York Times More on the convention “America, I gave my best to you,” Biden said in a speech that also criticized Donald Trump. Biden called picking Harris as his running mate the best decision of his career. He joked that “like many of our best presidents, she was also vice president.” Introduced by his daughter Ashley, Biden dabbed tears as convention delegates held signs reading “We ❤️ Joe.” Speaking earlier, Hillary Clinton said, “On the other side of that glass ceiling is Kamala Harris raising her hand and taking the oath of office.” Several speakers contrasted Harris’s background with Trump’s felony convictions. Clinton smiled and nodded as the audience chanted “lock him up.” Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers union wore a T-shirt that read “Trump is a scab.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the House progressive, praised Harris for supporting populist economic policies and seeking a cease-fire in Gaza. Biden and other speakers at times exaggerated or left out context. Read a fact check. Senate Democrats in tough races, including Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, are skipping the convention. A pro-Palestinian protest outside the hall was smaller than organizers had expected. The police detained a few people who lobbed signs and cans. More on the campaign Trump, campaigning in Pennsylvania, referred to Harris as “Comrade Kamala” and “an economy wrecker and a country destroyer.” Iran hacked Trump’s campaign and tried to hack Biden and Harris’s, U.S. intelligence agencies said. On social media, Trump shared A.I.-generated images suggesting that Taylor Swift had endorsed him. She hasn’t. THE LATEST NEWS Israel-Hamas War Antony Blinken in Tel Aviv. Pool photo by Kevin Mohatt American officials say Israel has accepted a U.S. intermediate proposal in cease-fire talks with Hamas, which is meant to help work through their remaining disagreements. Hamas officials have not yet agreed to the deal, which they have called slanted toward Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the proposal “probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity” to secure a truce. An Israeli airstrike demolished an apartment in central Gaza. Israel said it had targeted a member of the group Islamic Jihad. Locals said the strike killed a teacher and her six children. Hamas and Islamic Jihad took responsibility for an explosion in Tel Aviv, which they said was a suicide bombing. There hasn’t been one in Israel since around 2016. War in Ukraine In Ukraine. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times Women in Ukraine are stepping into male-dominated jobs as war depletes the work force. Ukraine destroyed several bridges in the Kursk region, the part of Russia where it has made an incursion, cutting off Moscow’s routes for resupply or retreat. More International News Federal judges across Mexico voted to strike. They are protesting President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s push for judges to be elected rather than appointed. Six people are missing after a yacht sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily, including a British software mogul who was recently acquitted of fraud charges. India plans to build ports and expand docks as part of a push to become a global manufacturing giant. Other Big Stories George Santos Dave Sanders for The New York Times George Santos, the former House Republican who lied about his background, pleaded guilty to identity theft and wire fraud. He faces at least two years in prison. The F.D.A.’s top regulator for medical devices is married to a lawyer whose firm represents medical device companies. A Times investigation uncovered instances where their jobs intersected. New rules around real estate commissions took effect over the weekend, but many buyers — and even some brokers — still aren’t sure what they mean. Here’s a guide to the changes. A blue supermoon will be visible through Wednesday. Read what to know. Opinions Times Opinion columnists picked their best and worst moments of the first day of the Democratic National Convention. Trump got overconfident while Biden was still running — and now he’s chasing his losses, Nate Silver writes. Here is a column by Paul Krugman on Harris’s economic platform. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS In Portland, Maine. T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times Bootmobile: Riding shotgun through New England inside a giant L.L. Bean boot. Energy: Coal power defined this Minnesota town. Can solar win it over? Animal welfare: The last horse-drawn carriage operator in Brussels has gone electric. Solid start: More parents are giving their babies solid food that they feed to themselves in place of spoon-feeding. Lives Lived: The chef Michel Guérard’s efforts to lose weight, and his disgust with traditional diet dishes, inspired him to develop what he called “cuisine minceur” — a low-fat, no-sugar application of nouvelle cuisine. He died at 91. SPORTS M.L.B.: Austin Riley, the Atlanta Braves’ star third baseman, is expected to miss six to eight weeks with a fractured hand. N.F.L.: The Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa spoke about playing under the team’s former coach Brian Flores, describing him as a negative presence who told him he “shouldn’t be here.” ARTS AND IDEAS At the British Museum. (Those are casts of gems.) Sam Bush for The New York Times It has been a year since the British Museum fired a curator for stealing artifacts from its storerooms and selling them online. While a police investigation continues, the institution has appointed a team of eight, each person focusing on a different area, to help recover around 1,500 stolen artifacts. They’re trawling the internet, public auctions and the collections of other museums. A Times reporter, Alex Marshall, spoke to the recovery team. More on culture Phil Donahue leading a discussion on the life of young people in the Soviet Union in Moscow in 1987. Boris Yurchenko/Associated Press Phil Donahue, the longtime daytime TV talk show host who revolutionized the form by inviting the audience to participate, died at 88. The late night hosts discussed the first night of the Democratic National Convention. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Kerri Brewer for The New York Times Roast soft and deliciously spiced rounds of eggplant. Save money when cooking for one. Try rødgrød med fløde, a berry pudding that tastes like summer in Denmark. Preserve summer produce with a great food dehydrator. Clean your headphones. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was atrophy. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —David P.S. A group of Times colleagues has been meeting to read and discuss Emily Wilson’s translation of the “Iliad.” As Wilson tweeted, “Ancient epics are fun to talk about!” Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 21, 2024 Author Members Posted August 21, 2024 August 21, 2024 Good morning. Today, my colleague Shane Goldmacher explains the battle over who is the candidate of change. We’re also covering the war in Ukraine, Gaza cease-fire talks and marijuana prices. —David Leonhardt In Chicago. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times Agents of change By Shane Goldmacher I cover politics. It’s hard for the party that holds the White House to run as the party of change. But Kamala Harris and the Democrats are trying. Running on change is often smart politics. Voters are perennially unhappy with the country’s trajectory, and the pandemic made it worse. According to Gallup, it has been two decades since a majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the direction of the nation. No wonder politicians cater to them with promises of new beginnings. When Donald Trump was still facing President Biden — just a month ago — the former president could make a clearer case. Trump was out of power. He was the insurgent running against an incumbent. He promised to alter the country’s course. Now Harris has jostled that dynamic after her party’s midsummer candidate switch. At its convention in Chicago this week, the Democratic Party has embraced the 59-year-old as the face of a new generation in a presidential contest that had previously featured two men seeking to set the record as the oldest person ever to serve. Inside the convention hall, chants of “We’re not going back” have rung out. And a fresh campaign slogan, “A New Way Forward,” is on banners and in speeches. In today’s newsletter, I’ll look at that battle over who best represents change. What polling shows Embodying change has mattered for many years. Long before Barack Obama promised “change you can believe in,” Bill Clinton pitched “change versus more of the same.” Trump, of course, captured the change vote in 2016 when he promised a clean break from the Obama years. Kamala Harris on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times If anything, the desire for change has grown in the past decade. When a New York Times/Siena College poll asked voters in May what they thought the country’s political and economic system required, the results were overwhelming: 69 percent said either major changes were needed or the system needed to be torn down entirely. Only 24 percent of voters thought Biden would do either of those things. But recent polls in swing states suggest people view Harris differently. While far more voters still see Trump as more likely than Harris to make major changes — 80 percent to 46 percent — they are more divided on whether he would bring the kind of change that they want. In fact, an identical share of voters (50 percent vs. 50 percent) said Harris would bring about the right kind of change compared with Trump. The messaging wars The fight over who most represents change is playing out on television, where campaigns spend much of their money. Future Forward, the leading Harris super PAC, created 200 potential ads for her, its leader, Chauncey McLean, said this week. The group tested all of those ads to determine which ones will be most effective. So it is notable that several of the group’s ads already pitch Harris as a break with the past. “If you’ve had enough of this political era and you’re ready to turn the page, Kamala Harris is ready to lead us to the future,” concludes one recent spot. The ad on which the most money has been spent so far, according to AdImpact, is another one from Future Forward. It ends with a tagline on the screen: “Let the future begin.” In Raleigh, N.C. Erin Schaff/The New York Times “The Republicans were hoping that they were going to be able to paint her as more of the same,” explained McLean. But he said their surveys had shown that voters were open to Harris defining herself separately from Biden. Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s campaign managers, told me he didn’t think that Harris could seize the mantle of change from Trump. “They have no choice than to change the subject,” he said. “But changing the subject does not make you the agent of change.” Trump’s ads have yoked Harris to the least popular parts of the Biden-Harris administration. One recent spot features Harris saying the word “Bidenomics” three times in 30 seconds. Another, from a Trump super PAC, talks about inflation and the “border invasion,” with a video of Biden and Harris hoisting their arms in the air together. “Kamala owns this failed record,” the narrator says. The fight for change is just beginning. Harris allies say she has one obvious advantage that can’t be ignored: She looks like change. She’d be the first woman and the first person of South Asian descent to serve as president. Trump, of course, has brought a constant level of upheaval since his arrival on the political scene in 2015. The question, after nine years, is whether keeping Democrats in power can itself represent a break from that. More on the convention Barack and Michelle Obama. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times In back-to-back speeches, Michelle and Barack Obama reminded Democrats of a past era of hope and change, Peter Baker writes. “America, hope is making a comeback,” Michelle said. Their speeches cast Harris’s background as an embodiment of the American story, and Trump as its opposite. Michelle turned one of Trump’s statements against him, asking the crowd, “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” Barack urged Democrats not to get complacent. “For all the incredible energy we’ve been able to generate over the last few weeks — for all the rallies and the memes — this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.” Taunting Trump, Harris and Tim Walz drew a crowd of about 15,000 for a rally last night in the Milwaukee arena that hosted the Republican convention last month. Delegates formally nominated Harris and Walz in a high-energy, D.J.-led roll call that included Lil Jon, Spike Lee and Eva Longoria. Here’s a playlist of each state’s song. Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, called her a “joyful warrior” and poked fun at himself, recounting the rambling voice mail he left Harris before their first date. Several Republicans who oppose Trump spoke. Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump press secretary who quit a White House job on Jan. 6, endorsed Harris and said Trump “has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth.” Bernie Sanders’s speech criticized billionaires; the speaker who followed him, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, is one. Read more takeaways from the convention’s second night. Biden’s speech on Monday started behind schedule and ended after midnight Eastern. The convention’s organizers blamed “raucous applause.” (From The Times’s archives: George McGovern’s acceptance speech at the 1972 convention didn’t start until almost 3 a.m.) More on the campaign Trump called Harris “pro-crime” and “anti-police” at a Michigan event. He also falsely claimed that “nobody was killed” when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy’s running mate, said they were considering dropping out and endorsing Trump. THE LATEST NEWS More on Politics President Biden Eric Lee/The New York Times Biden approved a classified plan to guard against nuclear threats from China, Russia and North Korea. Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, and two Republicans advanced to the ranked-choice general election for Alaska’s sole House seat, The A.P. reports. Montana voters will decide whether to amend the state Constitution to protect abortion rights, joining eight other states with similar measures on the November ballot. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who helped unseat Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, easily beat a McCarthy-backed primary challenger. Middle East Israeli and Hamas officials have downplayed the idea that a cease-fire deal is imminent, saying mediators have yet to resolve major disputes. Israel said its forces had recovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages in southern Gaza. Five were previously known to have died. A senior Iranian military official said that retaliation against Israel for the killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran “could take a long time.” War in Ukraine In Kursk, Russia. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times Russian forces, now recovered from the initial shock of Ukraine’s incursion, want to exploit the war’s expansion by depleting Ukraine’s forces and making gains on other fronts. To meet their need for troops in Ukraine, Russian authorities have crossed borders to find deserters and bolstered a campaign to punish draft dodgers, The Wall Street Journal reports. Other Big Stories Internet speeds have slowed to a crawl in Pakistan. Rights groups blamed the government, and said officials were testing a system to surveil and control the internet. A Filipino janitor survived the Maui wildfires, but they destroyed everything she had. She couldn’t survive the year after. Electrical failures have caused major delays on Amtrak rail lines in the Northeast this summer. Some of the problem equipment is a century old. Opinions Mpox has the potential to create a pandemic. Rich countries should share their vaccines, not hoard them, Lawrence Gostin, Sam Halabi and Alexandra Finch write. Here are columns by Bret Stephens on illiberal student protests and Thomas Edsall on the risks of a second Trump term. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Señor Salme Our red neighbor: A century ago this week, a cosmic coincidence gave Americans a case of Mars-mania. Pot economics: Why does a jar of legal weed cost $60 in New York? A licensed dispensary explains its prices. Hard work and fizzy drinks: Read what it takes to live past 110 years old. Lives Lived: Ruth Johnson Colvin wasn’t a teacher, but she felt she had to do something to help residents of her town learn to read and write. She founded Literacy Volunteers of America, which now has 100,000 tutors in 42 states and 60 countries. She died at 107. SPORTS Tennis: Jannik Sinner, the men’s world No. 1, received an antidoping sanction after testing positive twice for a banned substance. M.L.B.: The New York Mets, one night after an electric walk-off win, lost to the Baltimore Orioles with a comedy of defensive errors. ARTS AND IDEAS Photo Illustration by The New York Times Disney’s stories are deeply embedded in American culture, and many parents consider a trip to one of the company’s parks to be a rite of passage. But they aren’t cheap: A week at Disney World now costs a family of four from $6,000 to $15,000, one analysis found, not including flights or souvenirs. Some families, then, are taking on debt to visit the theme parks. More on culture Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck last year. Maggie Shannon for The New York Times Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce from Ben Affleck after two years of marriage. The late night hosts discussed the Democratic convention: “Even Nancy Pelosi was chanting ‘We love Joe!’” Desi Lydic said. “It’s like the iceberg waving goodbye to the Titanic.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Bryan Gardner for The New York Times Sauté tomatoes slowly for a one-pot orzo inspired by the end of summer. Control all your gear with one remote. Consider an electric toothbrush. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was phoenix. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 22, 2024 Author Members Posted August 22, 2024 August 22, 2024 Good morning. Today, my colleague Conor Dougherty helps you understand why houses are so expensive. We also have all the latest from the Democratic convention. —David Leonhardt Construction in White Cloud, Mich. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times Dwell on this By Conor Dougherty I cover housing. The housing crunch has been well documented in high-cost big cities, where rents and mortgages break the bank. Now it has moved into the rest of the country. The culprit is too little housing, and it began two decades ago. In the three years leading up to the Great Recession, homebuilders started about two million homes a year. That number plunged during the crisis and never fully rebounded. Since 2010, builders have started about 1.1 million new homes a year on average — far below the 1.6 million needed to keep up with population growth. America is millions of homes behind, and it gets worse each year. Source: Census Bureau, via Federal Reserve The New York Times I spent a week this summer reporting in Kalamazoo, Mich., which isn’t an obvious candidate for a housing crisis. But prices exploded as the supply of homes fell behind the need. Now even middle-class families earning six figures struggle to make ends meet there, and Michigan lawmakers are subsidizing developers who build for those residents. The Times published my article about it this morning. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how this happened nationwide, why it could take a long time to fix and what policymakers are doing about it. Skittish builders Cities and states understand they have a housing problem. To increase the pace of construction, many have cut back regulatory barriers — like zoning and environmental rules — that make housing slow and expensive to build. Since 2018, for instance, states including California, Oregon, Montana and Arizona have passed laws to allow duplexes and small apartment buildings in neighborhoods that once contained only single-family homes. But the nation’s housing shortage isn’t only about zoning in cities. For one thing, developers everywhere find it harder to raise money, and homeowners find it harder to get loans. That’s because banks and the government, in a quest to prevent another housing bubble, have raised lending standards and made mortgages harder to get. For another, builders simply aren’t putting up subdivisions at the rate they once did. They’re cautious about overbuilding after the losses they incurred in the 2008 crisis, and they’ve become reluctant to invest and expand before they know they have a winning hand. For instance, many homebuilders moved away from off-the-shelf (“on spec”) homes; now they prefer customers to prepay for properties before they’re built. Land developers — companies that take a piece of dirt and add basic infrastructure like streets, plumbing and power, creating the lots where new homes are built — have also cut back. The number of vacant developed lots, or places where a homebuilder could start construction tomorrow, is still 40 percent below its pre-Great Recession level, said Ali Wolf, chief economist at Zonda, a data and consulting firm. Source: Zonda | Note: 2024 through the second quarter. The New York Times “The Great Recession broke the U.S. housing market,” she told me. A generational problem Most people aren’t going to live in new houses. But the entire housing market still benefits from them. That’s because new homes tend to get cheaper as they age. Over time, this creates what housing wonks call “naturally occurring affordable housing,” which is a polite way of saying places that are older and less nice. They’re a huge piece of the affordability puzzle; they helped Kalamazoo remain affordable for middle-class households. In Kalamazoo, Mich. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times What’s happened in Kalamazoo and around the country is that older, cheaper units have either fallen into uninhabitable disrepair or been sold to investors who rehab them and raise the rents. Rehabs like that are necessary, but without a constant pipeline of new construction, there aren’t “new old” buildings for the millions of families who need lower rents. To combat this, both Kalamazoo County and Michigan have expanded housing aid to middle-income households that used to be ineligible. The hope is that this and other subsidies will encourage builders to expand if they believe they’ll find buyers and renters who can afford the homes they make. It’s part of a nationwide shift. Housing assistance used to focus on poverty. Now it’s also becoming a middle-class support program. Shades of the same idea are in Vice President Kamala Harris’s housing plan, which calls for assistance for both first-time home buyers and developers who build housing for them. Cities and states are changing where and how housing is built; Republicans and Democrats agree on the urgency, and housing was a theme at both political conventions this summer. (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton mentioned it in their speeches this week.) But those changes will be measured in decades because we fell so far behind. In the meantime, millions of Americans are stuck. THE LATEST NEWS Democratic Convention Tim Walz Kenny Holston/The New York Times Tim Walz, introduced by former students and football players he coached, urged Democrats to do the work to elect Harris. “It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball,” he said. “You are my entire world, and I love you,” Walz told his family onstage. In the audience, his son Gus sobbed, pointed and mouthed, “That’s my dad.” (Watch the video.) Walz’s high-energy speech reflected unpretentious, mischievous style he forged growing up in Nebraska. Read a transcript. The parents of an American hostage held by Hamas thanked President Biden and Harris for working toward a deal to free their son and end the war in Gaza. Delegates chanted “bring them home.” Bill Clinton painted Donald Trump as self-interested and warned Democrats against complacency. “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen,” he said. Several speakers criticized Trump for tanking a bipartisan border-security bill and defended Harris’s record on the subject. Nancy Pelosi and others described their experiences on Jan. 6, warning of a continued threat to democracy. “I took an oath to defend the Constitution,” a former Capitol Police officer injured in the attack said, adding, “To Donald Trump I ask, why don’t you?” Celebrities abounded: Oprah Winfrey made a surprise appearance, Stevie Wonder and John Legend sang, Mindy Kaling hosted and Amanda Gorman performed a poem. Kenan Thompson of “Saturday Night Live” read from an oversize copy of Project 2025, Trump allies’ governing blueprint, asking: “You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?” More on the Election Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to end his presidential campaign this week, and is considering endorsing Trump. Trump held his first outdoor rally since the assassination attempt. He spoke in North Carolina from behind bulletproof glass, with snipers on nearby rooftops. He repeated his personal attacks on Harris and Biden, saying advisers had asked him to stick to policy but Democrats were “getting personal all night long.” Democratic fund-raising soared after Biden dropped out last month. U.S. Economy The Federal Reserve is poised to cut interest rates next month, minutes from its last meeting showed. The U.S. economy added about 818,000 fewer jobs over the past year than previously recorded, a large revision of Labor Department figures showed. Some Wall Street firms got access to the revised figures before they appeared on the department’s website, which could have let them trade on the information before the public. It’s unclear how the data leaked. Israel-Hamas War In northern Gaza. Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In Gaza, extended families and hospital workers are caring for the enclave’s many recently orphaned children. Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Israeli men clashed with the police in Jerusalem. They were protesting a court order that overturned their community’s exemption from the military draft. More International News In Kolkata, India. Piyal Adhikary/EPA, via Shutterstock The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in her own hospital has highlighted how unsafe India can be for women. A labor dispute halted rail freight in Canada. The shutdown could disrupt trade with the U.S. A bus from Pakistan overturned while traveling through Iran toward a Shiite Muslim pilgrimage site, killing at least 28 people, according to Iranian state media. Other Big Stories The percentage of Black and Hispanic students in M.I.T.’s incoming class fell after last year’s affirmative action ban. The share of Asian American students rose, while the share of white students fell slightly. Bird flu shows no signs of receding among American cattle and farm workers, and has spread to poultry. Representative Bill Pascrell, a 14-term New Jersey progressive who was poised to become the House’s oldest member, died at 87. Opinions Celebrities’ assistants have little power and a lot of responsibility. It’s a toxic dynamic, writes Rowena Chiu, who was an assistant to Harvey Weinstein. Here are columns by Carlos Lozada on Harris’s shifting convictions and Charles Blow on her “Beyoncé moment.” Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Photo illustration by Lauren Peters-Collaer “Tradwives”: Women who dress up as 1950s homemakers are driving the internet insane. Ask Well: “I had a C-section about a year ago, but my scar still sometimes hurts, itches and even smells. What’s going on?” The discount id: How Costco hacked the American shopping psyche. Lives Lived: Al Attles was a little-known player out of a historically Black college when the Warriors selected him in the 1960 N.B.A. draft. He became a face of the franchise for six decades, as a player, coach and general manager. Attles died at 87. SPORTS M.L.B.: The Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto announced his retirement after a 17-year career that will likely land him in the Hall of Fame. He was everything baseball needed, our columnist writes. N.F.L.: The Denver Broncos named the rookie Bo Nix as their starting quarterback after an impressive training camp. Cricket: The sport’s governing body moved the Women’s World Cup from Bangladesh to the United Arab Emirates because of political instability. ARTS AND IDEAS Monica Garwood Sex therapists deal with the same issues repeatedly: couples worried about mismatched libidos or whether they are having a “normal” amount of sex. Nearly a dozen experts shared their most common advice, including avoiding comparison, changing definitions of sex and understanding that there is more than one type of desire. Read more here. More on culture In Indianapolis. Jon Cherry for The New York Times Every summer, hundreds of college-age musicians spend hours and their own money pursuing a single goal: the drum corps world championship. On late night, Seth Meyers praised Michelle Obama’s convention speech. “I’m a little bummed she doesn’t want to get into politics,” he said. “But I’m very happy she doesn’t want to host a late-night talk show.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … David Malosh for The New York Times Add raisins and green olives to this Cuban-inspired picadillo for a sweet-salty-tangy pop. Book a last-minute Labor Day vacation. Invest in dorm gear that will last beyond graduation. Upgrade your gym bag. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were ambling, blaming and gambling. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 23, 2024 Author Members Posted August 23, 2024 August 23, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering Kamala Harris’s patriotic speech — as well as Ukraine, Israeli hostages and CrossFit. Kamala Harris Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’ Kamala Harris capped her first month as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate with a roughly 35-minute convention speech last night that embodied her aggressive efforts to win over swing voters. It was a patriotic speech that was hawkish on foreign policy and border security. She described the United States as the greatest country in the world — a view many Americans hold but most Democratic voters do not — and she ended by saying that being an American was “the greatest privilege on earth.” She promised to confront China, Russia, Iran and Iran-backed terrorists and to make sure that the U.S. military remained the “most lethal fighting force in the world.” She also offered a series of populist promises to help the middle class by reducing the cost of housing and health care — policies that many independents and some Republicans favor. And she spent little if any time on subjects that inspire passion among Democrats but are either secondary or off-putting to many swing voters, such as student debt forgiveness and President Biden’s climate agenda. You can read more about Harris’s speech in this news story, as well as in this article on how she contrasted herself with Donald Trump. In today’s newsletter, I want to explain why Harris’s move to the political center seems to be working, at least so far. Who vs. what Harris has surged in the polls, erasing Biden’s deficit and taking a small lead over Trump, for two main reasons. First, she has won over some swing voters, including independents, working-class Midwesterners and even a fraction of 2020 Trump voters. Second, she has done so at no apparent cost: In addition to attracting swing voters, she has built a bigger lead than Biden had among the Democratic base, such as young voters, college graduates and city residents. How could this be? It comes down to the difference between the who and the what of her candidacy. Loyal Democrats are energized about the who. They spent months agonizing over Biden’s flailing candidacy. Once he quit and Harris wrapped up party support in just a few hours, everything felt different. Democrats remembered what it was like to have a candidate who could deliver a speech without making people fret that something was about to go wrong. Harris is full of energy and joy. She can cogently explain the administration’s policies, and she seems to be having fun in the process. Amid this electricity, many Democrats have been willing to tolerate her triangulation in the service of winning. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times Harris isn’t just another Democratic politician, either. She would be the country’s first female president, of course, and is a woman of color. Today’s Democratic Party puts great emphasis on identity, especially race and gender. The party defines itself in large part as the defender of groups that suffer discrimination and injustice. Just watch Tuesday night’s ceremonial roll call to nominate Harris, when delegates celebrated her historic status — and their own identities. This focus on personal identity can give pathbreaking candidates more flexibility to stray from Democratic orthodoxy without angering the base. Barack Obama benefited from a similar dynamic in 2008. He was more moderate than some other Democratic candidates that year, yet he still excited many progressives. (Obama’s speech this week was also fairly moderate. Nonetheless, it received rapturous applause.) For all these reasons, Harris has formed an emotional bond with liberals and others who make up the Democratic base. That bond has freed her to pursue swing voters with the what of her candidacy. She offers an economic agenda that many working-class voters support. She claims that she, not Trump, is the true candidate of border security. She encourages “U.S.A.!” chants. Last night, she referred to American history as “the most extraordinary story ever told.” A tight race Even so, the presidential race remains close. Harris leads in enough states to win, but only just. And if recent polls have undercounted Trump voters as much as they did in 2016 and 2020, he would probably win an election held today. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times With the convention now over, Democrats won’t be able to control the narrative the way that they have this week. Republicans have already started running ads to remind voters of Harris’s liberal past. One ad opens by calling Harris a “San Francisco radical” and showing her wearing a Covid mask while she announces her pronouns. It then includes clips in which she calls for a ban on plastic straws, supports looser immigration policies and says more police officers don’t lead to more safety. Expect to see a lot of these ads before November. It is possible that Harris has been enjoying a temporary polling bump — from the good vibes of replacing Biden — that will soon fade. (In that case, I’ll be curious to see if Harris goes even further to moderate her image; she said nothing last night, for example, about whether she supported an “all of the above” energy policy to reduce prices.) Nobody knows what will happen between now and Election Day. What’s clear is that Harris has run an effective first month of her campaign, managing both to consolidate Democratic support and to moderately — in both senses of the word — expand her appeal. More from the convention Harris’s speech included a statement of support for Israel, a denunciation of Hamas and a demand for security and dignity for the people of Gaza. It was effort to bridge the Democratic Party’s divides on the war. Harris spoke about growing up in a working-class neighborhood with an immigrant single mother. “She taught us to never complain about injustice, but do something about it,” Harris said. “She also taught us, ‘And never do anything half-assed.’” Harris accused Trump and the Republicans of planning to jail opponents, cut taxes for the rich and ban abortion nationwide. “Simply put, they are out of their minds,” she said. “My entire career, I’ve only had one client: the people,” Harris said of her background as a prosecutor and lawmaker. Trump, she argued, was running “to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.” Read a transcript of her speech. Other speakers last night echoed Harris’s patriotic theme. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican former congressman, said, “I want to let my fellow Republicans in on the secret: The Democrats are as patriotic as us.” Members of the Central Park Five — who as boys were wrongfully convicted of attacking a woman in 1980s New York — criticized Trump. Years ago, he called for the return of the death penalty over the case. Celebrity appearances included the Chicks, who performed the national anthem, Kerry Washington, the singer Pink and the N.B.A. star Stephen Curry, who endorsed Harris in a video. Harris’s grandnieces led delegates in a call-and-response about how to pronounce her name. “First you say ‘comma,’ like a comma in a sentence,” one said. “Then you say ‘la,’ like ‘la-la-la-la-la,’” the other said. More on the campaign Trump, calling in to Fox News after Harris’s speech, sought to distance himself from Project 2025, his conservative allies’ governing blueprint, and accused Harris of failing to fix the problems she was “complaining about.” Trump said on social media that Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who is Jewish, had done “nothing” for Israel and called himself “the best friend that Israel, and the Jewish people, ever had.” Shapiro accused Trump of peddling antisemitic tropes. Arizona can require people registering to vote to show proof of citizenship, the Supreme Court said. Trump’s New Jersey golf club will host a fund-raiser to support Capitol rioters, billed as the J6 Awards Gala, next month. Arkansas’s Supreme Court rejected an effort to put an abortion-rights amendment on the November ballot, saying the paperwork was faulty. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed to withdraw from the presidential election in Arizona. He’s scheduled to speak about his campaign’s future today. THE LATEST NEWS War in Ukraine In eastern Ukraine. Thomas Peter/Reuters Ukraine’s two-week-old offensive in western Russia has slowed, while Russian forces have gained momentum in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. In Russia, negative feelings about Vladimir Putin have increased since Ukraine’s incursion, an analysis of online posts found. In Germany, strict budget rules and rising parties on the far left and far right are pushing the government to reduce its support for Ukraine. Israel-Hamas War “They could have brought him back”: The families of Israeli hostages whose bodies were recovered from Gaza this week expressed anger at Israel’s leaders for not agreeing to a cease-fire. A group representing hostage families said that autopsies found bullets in the recovered bodies. The military said it was too soon to tell if gunshot wounds were the cause of death. More International News The diamond was discovered by the company Lucara using X-ray technology. Lucara Diamond The second-largest diamond ever found was uncovered in Botswana. It’s the size of an adult’s palm, and weighs more than a pound. Italian divers recovered the body of the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, confirming that he was killed when his yacht sank in a storm. A volcano erupted in southwestern Iceland, the country’s sixth eruption since December. Other Big Stories The F.D.A. approved updated Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Only one in five American adults took booster shots last fall. A network of more than a dozen current and former inmates used drones to smuggle drugs into Georgia prisons, prosecutors said. Opinions Times Opinion columnists picked their best and worst moments of the last night of the Democratic convention. This month, the F.D.A. denied approval of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment. They won’t be approved until proponents stop conducting unethical clinical trials, Caty Enders writes. Here are columns by Paul Krugman on Trump and crime and Michelle Goldberg on why Harris needs Lina Khan. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Sphen, right, and his partner, Magic. SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium Love and loss: Sphen, a gentoo penguin who found international fame because of his relationship with another male penguin named Magic, died at 11. Altered states: A survey revealed similarities between psychedelic trips and near-death experiences. Pickle: A TikTok influencer’s recipes have caused a cucumber shortage in Iceland. Lives Lived: Charlene Marshall was at the center of a legal battle over the estate of the New York socialite Brooke Astor, her mother-in-law. Marshall’s husband, Anthony, was ultimately convicted of fraud, but she in some ways seemed like the one on trial. Marshall died at 79. SPORTS M.L.B.: The Seattle Mariners, who held a 10-game lead in the A.L. West two months ago, fired their manager Scott Servais. Our beat writer says the organization is at a crisis point. College football: The sport’s fall schedule kicks off this weekend. See our 12-team playoff projection. ARTS AND IDEAS CrossFit athletes observed a moment of silence. Amanda McCoy/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via Tribune News Service, via Getty Images The CrossFit Games are usually a triumphant moment, an extreme four-day test of fitness in which participants leap over hay bales, swing sledgehammers and toss medicine balls. This year, though, the competition turned tragic when a 28-year-old athlete from Serbia died during an open-water swim. His death has resurfaced simmering concerns that the games push competitors too far. More on culture Audre Lorde in 1981. JEB/Joan E. Biren A biography of the poet and thinker Audre Lorde offers a new way to think about her activism and legacy. Jon Stewart went live on the last night of the Democratic convention. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Julia Gartland for The New York Times Harness the delight of a chicken gyro in salad form. Download these free video games. Clean small messes with a hand-held vacuum. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were chunked and unchecked. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 25, 2024 Author Members Posted August 25, 2024 August 24, 2024 Good morning. Summer’s coming to a close soon. Regardless of how you feel about the passage, you’re still, to some extent, in control of how you spend the time. María Jesús Contreras Out of season You are going to encounter people this weekend who will tell you that there’s one week left of summer. You don’t have to believe them. You don’t have to be one of them. You can join me and the other equinoctials (do you think this term could catch on?) who live by the almanac. We’re not going gentle into our woolly cardigans until Sept. 22, the actual first day of fall. We’re savoring every last tomato, still sentimental about late sunsets, weirdly fond of that residual itch in a fading mosquito bite. Every time summer turns to fall, I do this. I try to articulate to anyone who will indulge me why one time of year is better than another, to make a case for why light and warm is superior to dark and cold. It’s a losing game: I’m burning whatever daylight is left arguing for why the earth should revolve differently, powerless against nature. I feel like Werner Herzog in “Burden of Dreams,” railing at the jungle: “Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe.” There is no harmony in the universe, so we try to create some with the calendar. Labor Day arrives and we shift gears, shift wardrobes and menus and mind-sets. Maybe our gaits get faster. Summer self is self-indulgent; fall self is all determination. Summer self puts things off and fall self gets things done. There’s a harmony and a rhythm to our seasonal incarnations that keeps things interesting, divides existence intomovements: adagio, andante, allegro. “Transitions are hard,” a colleague said to me today. She was joking around, being melodramatic about how she’d just arrived at the office and needed a minute to collect herself before a meeting began. But the transition from summer to fall, as anyone who’s ever tried to get a child ready for the first day of school can tell you, can be a particularly challenging one. And it doesn’t necessarily get better when you’re decades removed from going to school yourself. Summer’s all potential, all expectation. The end of summer is, inevitably, some of that potential unrealized, some of those expectations unmet. A little mourning might be appropriate. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Whether you believe that summer’s finito in a week or that we’ve still got time, there’s this weekend to exploit. This weekend, late August, 2024, wherever you find yourself, however you find yourself. Will you be stocking up on school supplies? Dropping someone off at college? Will you spend the weekend hunting down the perfect peach? Maybe you’re working, or worrying, or lying in a hammock watching the clouds. What do you want to do? How do you want things to go? This weekend, like every weekend, you’ve got choices. For more How to cope with fall anxiety. “In August, I feel acutely how lucky I am to belong to a species for whom yearning has no season.” Margaret Renkl on the end of summer. It’s not too late to attend to your summer bucket list. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV Phil Donahue in 1973. via Everett Collection Phil Donahue, who died this week at 88, will be remembered as the king of daytime television. Here are three episodes that help explain his dominance. “Blink Twice,” directed by Zoë Kravitz and starring her fiancé, Channing Tatum, is one of 10 movies our critics reviewed this week. “Rings of Power,” the “Lord of the Rings” prequel series, returns on Amazon Prime next week. The second season has more creatures, and more evil. Wesley Morris became a film critic in 1999, a hallmark year for cinema. “Best. Movie. School. Ever,” he writes. Read his retrospective. Lionsgate retracted a trailer for “Megalopolis,” the new Francis Ford Coppola film, after a reporter at Vulture uncovered that it used fake quotations from critics. Chick-fil-A plans to present original family-friendly programming on its own streaming platform, Deadline reports. This season of “Love Island U.S.A.” has been the franchise’s most popular ever and has even outranked “The Bear” on streaming. Read takeaways from the reunion show. The film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us” depicts domestic abuse. Experts weighed in on the accuracy of its portrayal. Music Cash Cobain, right, in Coney Island. Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times With lusty rhymes and unorthodox samples, the rapper and producer Cash Cobain has become a central figure in the genre known as “sexy drill.” Taylor Swift said she felt guilt and fear over canceling her shows in Vienna because of a terrorist plot. Charles Cross, a Seattle music writer who charted the rise of grunge and wrote acclaimed biographies of Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, died at 67. Other Culture Stories At the Edinburgh Fringe festival, the comedian Hannah Gadsby debuted a new stand-up show that leans into fears and mental health worries. Rick Steves, the popular travel guidebook writer, said he was being treated for prostate cancer. THE LATEST NEWS 2024 Election Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Arizona yesterday. Thomas Machowicz/Reuters Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. He said he was dropping off the ballot in battleground states to avoid helping Kamala Harris and campaigned with Trump in Arizona. At a Nevada event, Trump thanked Kennedy for his endorsement and repeated his claim that undocumented immigrants were taking “African-American jobs,” adding, “A lot of those jobs are Hispanic jobs, too.” Harris unleashed energy and joy at the Democratic convention, The Times’s Peter Baker writes. But she and the party must now channel that into a sprint to Election Day. Trump, who has said he had “no regrets” about appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, claimed on social media that his administration will be “great” for women’s reproductive rights. The Secret Service reassigned five agents, including one from Trump’s personal detail, over security failures that led to the assassination attempt against him. Nebraska voters will decide between two abortion-related ballot measures in November — one to protect abortion rights, the other to limit them. Other Big Stories Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, strongly signaled that the Fed would cut interest rates next month. “The time has come for policy to adjust,” he said, citing falling inflation and rising unemployment. Texas and 15 other Republican-led states sued to halt a Biden administration program aimed at giving citizenship to undocumented immigrants married to Americans. Negotiations over a cease-fire in Gaza will continue next week. Israel’s desire to maintain a military presence along the Egypt-Gaza border after the war is among the sticking points. The Justice Department and several states filed an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, alleging that the real estate company’s software let landlords collude to raise rents. Italian divers recovered the body of the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch’s daughter, ending the search for survivors after Lynch’s yacht sank in a storm. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. CULTURE CALENDAR By Desiree Ibekwe 🎸 Short ‘n’ Sweet (Out now): Sabrina Carpenter became pretty famous this year. Her song “Espresso” was near ubiquitous, so much so that it started a conspiracy theory about why Spotify seemed to be recommending it to everyone, no matter their taste. Carpenter also supported Taylor Swift on tour, and social media buzzed about her relationship with the “Saltburn” star Barry Keoghan. Given her sudden ubiquity, it might be surprising learn that this is Carpenter’s sixth album. Her star has been a slow burner. She was, as Shaad D’Souza wrote in The Times, formerly a member of “pop’s middle class”: internet favorites whose celebrity outmatched their commercial success. This album — and her tour, which begins next month — will likely solidify her pop ascendancy. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Christopher Simpson for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Sweet Corn Pudding It’s been an excellent corn season here in the Northeast, with the ears in green-husked profusion at farmers’ markets everywhere. I like to spend the first few weeks of corn season devouring them simply, just boiled, buttered and salted. But a month in, it’s time to branch out and add juicy kernels to salads, sautés, sheet-pan meals and even dessert. Eric Kim’s sweet corn pudding is a mild, creamy custard based on majarete, a popular treat in parts of Latin America. It’s made by simmering corn cobs in milk, then using the infused liquid as the base of a cornstarch-thickened pudding scented with vanilla. As an added bonus, the cook gets to nibble on the milk-poached corn on the cob, a delicious byproduct that gives you something to snack on while waiting for the custard to chill. REAL ESTATE Alane Kruk Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times The Hunt: A retired schoolteacher sought a new start in Southern California with less than $800,000. Which home did she choose? Play our game. What you get for $3 million: A 1911 Arts and Crafts estate in Portland, Ore.; a four-bed, four-bath in Charlotte, N.C.; or an 1870 brick townhouse in Boston. LIVING Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck Maggie Shannon for The New York Times Relationships: The breakup of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck shows the risks of rekindling a romance. Here are four questions to ask before reuniting with an ex. Calm spaces: Airlines and hotels are working to ease the challenges of neurodivergent travelers. Letter of Recommendation: “I kept failing to learn French. This is what finally worked.” Mental health: Matthew Perry’s death has shone a harsh light on the use of ketamine to treat depression. Dreaded drops: Do you really need dilation at every eye exam? Here’s what the evidence suggests. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Good drugstore beauty products Wirecutter’s beauty editors have kissed a lot of frogs: sticky lip glosses, chalky foundations, noxious shampoos … the list goes on. They’ve also learned that hidden among the thousands of beauty items crowding drugstore shelves are some stellar standouts, like cheap-but-effective skin care, great hair tools and makeup dupes for much pricier brands. They’ve compiled the best finds in this guide to the best drugstore beauty products. A good drugstore product is not only inexpensive and readily available, but it’s also one you find yourself buying again and again. — Hannah Morrill GAME OF THE WEEK Japan’s Taiyo Honryo facing Venezuela on Thursday. Tom E. Puskar/Associated Press Little League World Series: Four teams of kids are competing for youth sports glory this weekend in Williamsport, Pa., and the rest of us get to enjoy some nostalgic fun. This is for anyone who took part in Little League, or cheered for a sibling in left field, or rode their bike down to the park to hang out and eat junk food while a game played out nearby. Taoyuan City, Taiwan, plays Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in the international final today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern. The U.S. final — Boerne, Texas, vs. Lake Mary, Fla. — follows at 3:30 p.m. The winners play in the championship tomorrow. All games on ABC NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were potable and tabletop. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 25, 2024 Author Members Posted August 25, 2024 August 25, 2024 Good morning. Today, my colleague Vanessa Friedman explains the deliberate choices behind politicians’ convention outfits. We’re also covering Israel and Hezbollah, immigration and skateboarding moms. —David Leonhardt Kent Nishimura for The New York Times Party attire By Vanessa Friedman I’m The Times’s chief fashion critic. Every time discussions of fashion intrude on discussions of politics, as they do in moments of high pageantry such as our national party conventions, a certain amount of freaking out ensues. Sexist!, the lament generally goes. Superficial! (That’s the nice version.) But here’s the thing: There’s a reason we refer to “the national stage” and the “theater of politics.” Costume is an intrinsic part of any drama, for both the stars and the supporting cast. It is woven into the creation and communication of character. We make instant judgments about one another based on the images we see. It’s human instinct and part of how we decide if someone is likable or believable or a leader, as political figures of all genders, from Castro to Cleopatra, have always been aware. To not acknowledge that our candidates consider how style connects to substance is to give them less credit than they are due. After all, no one can fill every moment with policy proposals. But they can always look the part. Here are seven politicians who did it most notably during the Republican and Democratic conventions. Erin Schaff/The New York Times Kamala Harris: For the biggest, most consequential speech of her life, Harris accepted her nomination as the Democratic candidate for president not in white, but in navy blue. That’s a bigger symbolic statement than it may at first appear. Since 2016, when Hillary Clinton strode onstage in her white Ralph Lauren, assuming the mantle of the women who had fought for a political voice before her, the white pantsuit has become a political trope, a way for women (Democratic and otherwise) to demonstrate solidarity and signal their opposition to Donald Trump and his policies. By making a different choice, Harris may have brought that particular historical chapter to a close. As she said in her speech, it was time “to chart a new way forward” — and she dressed the part. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times JD Vance: On the last day of the Republican convention, the vice-presidential nominee telegraphed the fact that he was on the same page as his running mate by adopting Trump’s signature uniform of red tie, white shirt and blue suit — though he stuck with his beard, an accessory that breaks all the rules of modern politics. There hasn’t been a candidate with facial hair on a major party presidential ticket in 75 years. Still, his scruff matches the beard worn by Donald Trump Jr., and it speaks to clichés of he-man frontiersmanship that reflect Vance’s more traditional approach to gender roles. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times Melania Trump: The former first lady made a rare public appearance to stand by her husband’s side at the R.N.C., and she made it count in a red Dior suit that she had previously worn on a 2017 state trip to Paris. It was an implicit nod to the period when the Trumps occupied the White House, and a reminder, like the virtual White House projected behind Trump as he made his speech, of their goal. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Tim Walz: Pretty much from the moment Harris chose him as her running mate, the narrative around the Minnesota governor has focused on his regular guy cred, as represented by his penchant for plaid shirts, Carhartt, Filson and other costumes of regular guy-hood. When he took the stage to accept the nomination for vice president, however, Walz did so in an impeccably tailored navy suit, blue tie and pristine white shirt — the uniform of the D.C. establishment. It sent a message that his character didn’t just play on the campaign trail, but in the corridors of power. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times Michelle Obama: The former first lady has always understood that if the spotlight is going to be thrust upon her, she might as well use every photon available to her own ends, including those focused on what she wears. So as she spoke in support of Harris, she did so in a pantsuit — but not a traditional political woman’s pantsuit. Her pantsuit, by the small independent New York brand Monse, featured a sleeveless jacket that had been de- and reconstructed, so the lapels crossed over the throat in an almost futuristic, militaristic way. This election is going to be a fight, her tunic and her speech suggested, and everyone should gear themselves up to get out the vote. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times Nikki Haley: The former Trump opponent was a surprise presence onstage at the R.N.C., but her very wardrobe was a form of outreach. If she didn’t have an olive branch, exactly, on her dress (which happened to be by the same designer, Teri Jon, who had made the “fancy-but-not-so-fancy” dress she wore during her campaign), it did feature a veritable bouquet of red and blue blooms. Eric Lee/The New York Times Andy Beshear: The governor of Kentucky was the rare (very rare) male politician to speak at the D.N.C. and eschew a tie. The decision may have been an effort to signal his status as a next-gen Democrat, though the fact that he wore a high-collared white shirt buttoned almost to the neck, and also buttoned his blue suit jacket while onstage, somewhat undercut the hipster-casual vibe he seemed to be going for. THE LATEST NEWS Middle East A view of southern Lebanon. Aziz Taher/Reuters Israel bombarded dozens of targets in southern Lebanon in what it called a pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah and said it thwarted a major attack. Benjamin Netanyahu said that “thousands of rockets” aimed at the country had been destroyed. Hezbollah said that it had fired more than 320 rockets at Israeli bases and positions. It was not immediately clear if any of the rockets had hit their targets. The exchange fell short of the major escalation many have feared after an Israeli airstrike killed a Hezbollah commander. See a timeline of recent tensions in the region. With concerns rising about a potential wider war in the region, the U.S. has steadily been moving Navy forces closer to the area. More International News Poets have fueled a literary revival in Ukraine by capturing people’s feelings about the war. The German police made a third arrest and said they had ended the search for a suspect in connection with a deadly knife attack at a street festival in the western city of Solingen. Two vehicles parked outside a synagogue exploded in a French town in what prosecutors called an act of terrorism. Politics The number of people asking for haven has fallen in the months since President Biden imposed asylum restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border, Department of Homeland Security figures show. The Democrats’ message on immigration has become more hard-line than it has been in decades, a reflection of the party’s political vulnerability on the issue. JD Vance became Catholic in part because he was drawn to the church’s desire to instill virtue in modern society. Read about how he found his way to the church. Other Big Stories The astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. NASA HANDOUT/EPA, via Shutterstock NASA has decided that two astronauts who have already spent months aboard the International Space Station will have to stay there until next year, saying that they could not return on a troubled Boeing space vehicle. Developers and landlords of subsidized housing say that rising property insurance costs could put them out of business. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Did Harris’s convention address make a strong case for her candidacy? No. Harris’s speech was more about introducing herself and distinguishing herself from Trump than about what she was going to do when she is president. “Unremarkability is a virtue Harris will sell,” Keith Naughton writes for The Hill. Yes. Harris’s speech, confident and grounded in values, transformed her into someone who should be America’s next commander in chief. “Her rhetoric captured both the best of being a storyteller telling a tale about people and the role of being a leader calling a nation to rise up,” The Daily Beast’s David Rothkopf writes. FROM OPINION Alex Edelman lost his friend and collaborator shortly before their comedy show opened on Broadway. After a successful run, a tour and an HBO special, he looks back on what his friend missed. Here are columns by Nicholas Kristof on Republicans’ anti-family policies and Maureen Dowd on Trump. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS At the skatepark. Josh Katz for The New York Times Falls and all: These moms have found community in skateboarding. Conservation: Scientists made a list of birds that have not been seen in at least a decade. They want you to help find them. Routine: How a children’s museum director spends her Sundays. Vows: “The Fake Grey Lady” has her own love story to tell. Lives Lived: Hettie Jones was a poet and author who, along with her husband, LeRoi Jones, made her household a hub for Beat writers and other artists. She died at 90. THE INTERVIEW Jenna Ortega Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By Lulu Garcia-Navarro This week’s subject for The Interview is Jenna Ortega, who is starring in the new movie, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” the sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 classic. Ortega started her career as a child actor, playing the lead on the Disney Channel series “Stuck in the Middle.” But it was the role of Wednesday on the Netflix show of the same name that changed her life in significant, and disorienting, ways. We spoke about what it’s like to get so famous so fast. You wrote a book when you were 17, and in it you talk about insecurities and mental-health challenges. You’re 21 now. I’m wondering since your career blew up, does that make things easier or harder? Much, much harder. Really? Yes, of course. Because I’ve always been someone who’s put an immense amount of pressure on myself, but it’s a bit different when you can’t really walk outside without expecting to be pointed at or — it’s kind of died down now, but still, I walk into a room, and I am looking at everything differently. I was a private person, and I prefer to be a private person, so I think understanding that there’s a lot more eyes and a lot more people watching — and I’m so underdeveloped! My prefrontal cortex isn’t even fully there yet, technically, you know? I want to be making the mistakes and learning from them and falling on my face and maybe the opposite. I want to be extremely confident and try everything and do everything and be the biggest risk taker in the world. There’s a lot more at stake now, whether I like it or not, and people are entirely entitled to share their opinion, even when maybe it’s not the most welcome, but I think it’s just — sorry, I’m trying to think of the best way to phrase this or put this in a way that is still refreshing — Just say it in the way that you feel it. It’s really scary, actually. And it’s hard to say that because mostly you can’t complain. I wanted this when I was a child. I live such a privileged life. I’m so lucky to do the things that I do. I love my job. I don’t see myself wanting to stop my job. There are certain things that no one can really prepare you for, though, and that kind of attention is one of them. Read more of the interview here. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Painting by Alan Coulson. Source photograph by Kelia Anne MacCluskey. Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine. BOOKS Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times Grammar time: In Britain, MC Grammar’s rhymes have made reading all the rage among young people. Our editors’ picks: “The Coin,” a smart novel about a Palestinian schoolteacher in New York and American consumerism, and five other books. Times best sellers: Anna Marie Tendler’s memoir, “Men Have Called Her Crazy,” is new on the hardcover nonfiction list. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Pack a school lunch your kid will actually eat. Prepare for a hurricane with these supplies. Declutter your email inbox. THE WEEK AHEAD What to Watch For Proceedings are set to begin tomorrow to decide if the Kroger Company can acquire Albertsons. It would be the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history. The Paralympics opening ceremony is on Wednesday. The Venice International Film Festival begins on Wednesday. Friday is the deadline for Trump and his prosecutors to assess how presidential immunity affects his election interference case. Meal Plan Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Eugene Jho. In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Mia Leimkuhler hails the affordability, availability and versatility of chicken. She suggests recipes she often makes herself, including sheet-pan paprika chicken, panang curry and a chicken and egg rice bowl. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was companion. Can you put eight historical events — including the creation of the Taj Mahal, Michelangelo’s David, and bungee jumping — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Correction: Yesterday’s edition of The Morning mistakenly omitted the byline. The newsletter was written by Melissa Kirsch, our usual Saturday writer. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 27, 2024 Author Members Posted August 27, 2024 August 27, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering unanswered questions about a Harris administration — as well as the Telegram founder, an attack in Ukraine and an Oasis comeback tour. Vice President Kamala Harris. Eric Lee/The New York Times What would she do? Kamala Harris has largely avoided answering questions since her campaign began: She hasn’t participated in a town hall or given an extended media interview. She and her aides say she will do one soon. In the meantime, I’ve worked with my Times colleagues to put together a list of 21 questions that could help the country understand how she would govern. Here they are, separated into four categories. Economic policy Construction in Alabama. Micah Green for The New York Times 1. Madam Vice President, your agenda revolves around helping the middle class — such as offering a credit of up to $25,000 for first-time home buyers and increasing the child tax credit. You haven’t said much about some big related issues, though, including paid leave and universal preschool. Will you try to revive President Biden’s plans? 2. You support raising taxes on households that make more than $400,000. But these tax increases may not be large enough both to pay for your agenda and to reduce the federal debt, as you’ve promised. How would you reduce the debt? 3. Biden has been more populist than other recent Democratic presidents. He’s skeptical of free trade and has subsidized manufacturing. Are you as populist as he is? Or are there any policy areas in which you would return to a more market-friendly, neoliberal approach? 4. Biden has cracked down on monopoly power, and a central player in this fight is Lina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission, who has focused on Big Tech. Some of your campaign donors in Silicon Valley want you to fire her. Would you? 5. The Biden administration made an important change on climate policy, emphasizing subsidies for clean energy rather than taxes on dirty energy. This approach is more politically popular. Is it delivering fast enough climate progress? 6. You support the PRO Act, which would make it easier for workers to join unions. Recent Democratic presidents have supported similar bills — but failed to pass them. How would you give wary labor leaders confidence that the PRO Act will be a priority? 7. You’ve blamed corporate price gouging for high grocery prices. Many economists disagree, arguing that the industry has too much competition for widespread gouging to be a problem. Can you explain how your anti-gouging policy would lower prices? 8. The U.S. government has done little to regulate social media, and social media has contributed to some big problems, like polarization and loneliness. Now we have a new technological force: A.I. How would you regulate it? Social issues A woman receiving abortion care in Arizona. Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times 9. Would you support eliminating the filibuster to pass a bill that restores nationwide abortion rights? 10. You have changed your position on immigration. You once called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. Now you are an immigration hawk who promises to secure the border better than Donald Trump would. Can you explain your evolution? 11. Four years ago, you said, “It is actually wrong and backward to think that more police officers will create more safety.” Do you still believe that? Foreign policy Ukrainian servicemen in the eastern Donetsk region. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times 12. Many Ukraine supporters think the Biden administration has been too cautious with its aid. Would you be more aggressive with the kind of weapons you sent? 13. Military analysts are skeptical that Ukraine can ever regain all of its prewar territory. How does this war end? 14. It can be hard to see a path to peace for Israelis and Palestinians. How would you both alleviate Palestinian suffering and protect Israel from the enemies that seek its destruction? 15. The Biden administration initially distanced itself from Saudi Arabia but has since signaled that the U.S. needs the Saudis — much as the Trump administration believed — both to help moderate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to counter Iran’s aggression. What would your Saudi policy be? 16. Iran has made progress toward being able to build a nuclear weapon. If intelligence agencies told you that Iran was building a weapon, would you order a military attack? Or can the world live with a nuclear-armed Iran? 17. Taiwan is a thriving democracy that China evidently wants to conquer. Biden has said that the U.S. would fight to defend Taiwan if China attacked. Still, some experts doubt the U.S. would. If China did invade, what would you do? 18. Trump frequently criticizes U.S. allies for not pulling their weight. Do you think Western Europe, Japan and Canada spend enough on their militaries? If not, how would you pressure them? Politics and more 19. Donald Trump can sound unhinged, telling frequent lies and rejecting basic democratic traditions. Yet millions of Americans — including more voters of color than in the past — support him. Why do you think so many people are frustrated enough that they find Trump appealing? 20. Your campaign spends less time describing Trump as an existential threat than Biden or Hillary Clinton did and more time ridiculing Trump. What do you think are the most effective ways to persuade swing voters that he shouldn’t be president? 21. Are there any U.S. presidents you particularly admire — besides Biden, Barack Obama and the typical answers of F.D.R., Lincoln and Washington — and why? More on the election Kamala Harris is a change candidate who is proving tough for Donald Trump to attack. Nate Cohn analyzes if her lead will last. Jack Smith, the special counsel, asked a federal appeals court to revive the classified-documents case against Trump. A Trump-appointed judge threw out the case last month. Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery to honor soldiers killed in a bombing during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. He criticized Biden and Harris for the exit. Harris said she mourned the soldiers’ deaths and called Biden’s decision to withdraw “courageous and right.” Democrats sued Georgia’s election board over its rules letting officials conduct “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results, arguing that the rules invited chaos. Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, will be on the ballot in Wisconsin, the state’s Supreme Court ruled. She could pull votes from Harris. Jason DeParle, who covers poverty, compared the Trump and Harris plans for housing, health care and food assistance. THE LATEST NEWS More on Politics Lawmakers in Butler, Pa. Kristian Thacker for The New York Times Members of the bipartisan House task force investigating the Trump assassination attempt visited the site of the shooting. Lawmakers walked the grounds and climbed onto the roof from which the gunman fired. A federal judge paused a Biden administration program aimed at giving citizenship to undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens, siding with 16 Republican-led states. An Arizona police association that endorsed Trump for president endorsed Ruben Gallego, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate, over Kari Lake, a Trump ally, The Hill reports. Telegram Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder. Jim Wilson/The New York Times The arrest of the founder of Telegram, a messaging app with a hands-off approach to content moderation, started a conversation about free speech online. Read more about him. Telegram’s openness has made it popular with people living in authoritarian countries, like Russia. But it has also attracted terrorists and scammers. War in Ukraine Russia launched another wave of missiles and drones, a day after a major attack on Ukrainian cities. In recent months, Russia has been using glide bombs, which have allowed its forces to raze whole towns and villages quickly. More International News The captain of the yacht that sank in Italy is under investigation in connection to the seven deaths from the disaster. A typhoon approaching Japan has caused flight cancellations and disrupted high-speed rail travel. Canada will impose a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, matching the one the U.S. set this year. A Chinese surveillance plane flew over Japanese territory near Nagasaki Prefecture. It’s the first time that China’s military has entered Japanese airspace, Japan’s Defense Ministry said. Other Big Stories Two people were found shot dead in a dorm room at Rice University in Houston, in an apparent murder-suicide. A Dutch watchdog fined Uber $324 million, saying it improperly sent sensitive information about drivers to the U.S. Federal officials charged two men with damaging an ancient rock formation at Lake Mead in Nevada. Opinions Be skeptical of what the polls say about the 2024 election. They’re an art as much as they are a science, Kristen Soltis Anderson writes. The U.S. has finally held the banana company Chiquita accountable for its dealings with Colombian paramilitaries. Colombia can do the same, Ignacio Gómez G. writes. Here are columns by Paul Krugman on the politics of inflation and Pamela Paul on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Trump endorsement. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Team Army athlete Henry Escobedo and running guide Preston Gantt. Jacob Langston for The New York Times Warrior Games: Disabled troops used to have to leave the military. Now some compete for gold. Later marriages: In China, which has more people 65 or older than any other country, more people are looking for a chance at love. Sex education: To avoid temptation, Hong Kong tells teenagers: Play badminton. Ask Vanessa: “Is it better to be over- or underdressed?” Environment: Your water bottle claims to be made of mostly recycled plastic. But it may not be. Travel: To explore Kenya, join a local hiking club. Lives Lived: Tom Brown Jr. was considered the U.S.’ foremost authority on wilderness survival, having taught thousands of people how to track deer, fletch arrows, forage for food and thrive in the great outdoors. He died at 74. SPORTS High school football: Caden Tellier, a quarterback in Selma, Ala., died after suffering a head injury during his team’s first game of the season. N.F.L.: The Dallas Cowboys agreed to terms on a contract extension with the star receiver CeeDee Lamb, ending a long holdout. M.L.B.: The Boston Red Sox catcher Danny Jansen became the first player in league history to appear in the same game — playing for both teams. See how it happened. U.S. Open: Coco Gauff, Novak Djokovic and Aryna Sabalenka all advanced in straight sets. Gauff is trying to become the first repeat women’s Open winner since 2014. ARTS AND IDEAS Liam and Noel Gallagher in 1999. Shutterstock The band Oasis announced a reunion tour after 15 years of fighting between its two leaders, Liam and Noel Gallagher, who are brothers. The band split up in 2009 — “I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer,” Noel said at the time — and over the years the Gallaghers have continued to lob public insults at each other. They seem to have reconciled enough to plan a comeback tour for summer 2025, in Britain and Ireland. More on culture A businessman abandoned his pursuit of Paramount, the production company, all but ensuring that it will be acquired by Skydance. A sequel to “Beetlejuice” — called “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” — opens at the Venice Film Festival tomorrow. The Times spoke with Tim Burton and the cast. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times Add tzatziki to this chickpea salad. Make caregiving more manageable with these books. Travel with a great backpack. Stop washing your jeans so often. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was holiday. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 28, 2024 Author Members Posted August 28, 2024 August 28, 2024 SUPPORTED BY BLAND AI By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering the rise of fare evasion on subways and buses — as well as Donald Trump, a hostage rescue and clubbing with kids. A subway station in Manhattan. Stephanie Keith for The New York Times ‘Not an orderly place’ I’ve been riding the subway regularly for almost 40 years, first in New York, where I grew up, and these days in Washington, D.C. When I started doing so, in the 1980s, fare evasion was common. I saw many people jump turnstiles, and I’ll confess that I cheated once myself: As teenagers, a friend and I squeezed through the gate together at Shea Stadium to save $1. It seemed like a normal New York thing to do. Until it didn’t. As part of the city’s crackdown on crime in the 1990s, the subway system became a cleaner and safer place. I saw very few people jump turnstiles in New York in the early 2000s. The same was true in Washington. It is not true anymore. For the past few years, fare beating has again become a regular part of public transit. I’ve watched people do it just a few feet away from powerless transit workers looking directly at them. My colleague Ana Ley, who covers mass transit, wrote a story this week focused on buses that quantified the problem in New York City with a jarring statistic: On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday. Source: M.T.A. | Local bus data is through the first quarter of 2024; subway data is through the second. | By The New York Times This evasion has become a major financial problem for the transit system, which depends on fares for revenue. The trend has also created a sense of chaos and unfairness. “Something should be done about it,” Mary Parrish, a frustrated 85-year-old retired teacher, told The Times while waiting for a bus in Brooklyn. Janno Lieber, chief executive of the transit system, which is known as the M.T.A., has called fare evasion “the No. 1 existential threat” because it creates a sense of lawlessness. “It says at the doorway: This is not an orderly place,” Lieber said. The subways have indeed become less orderly. Violent crime, per subway rider, has risen sharply since 2019, as Nicole Gelinas wrote for Times Opinion. In a survey last year, only 49 percent of daytime subway riders said they felt safe, down from 82 percent in 2017. Two big reasons Covid is part of the explanation. The transit system suspended some fare collection in 2020, which fed the notion that paying was optional. Society’s long pandemic shutdowns also seem to have contributed to a malaise from which the country has still not recovered. But M.T.A. data makes clear that Covid isn’t the only cause of growing fare evasion — because it began rising sharply in 2017, not 2020. The second big cause is also part of a larger story. In the late 2010s, calls began growing for a more relaxed approach to law enforcement. Crime had fallen so low that it didn’t always seem like a threat. And more people had understandably grown concerned about mass incarceration, given that the U.S. was a global outlier and disproportionately locked up people of color. These concerns helped lead to several policy changes. In Oregon, citizens voted to decriminalize all drugs. In Washington D.C., Democratic politicians questioned the importance of immigration enforcement. In New York, the Manhattan district attorney in 2017 stopped pursuing most fare evasion cases, and Brooklyn took similar steps. Times Square subway station. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times These policies haven’t aged very well. Fare evasion in New York has surged. Oregon, faced with neighborhoods coping with sick addicts and public defecation, recently restored some penalties for drug use. On immigration, the Biden administration’s loosening of border policy has frustrated even many Democratic voters, mayors and governors — and the administration has since reversed itself. The subway systems in New York and other cities have also made changes. Washington and Philadelphia have installed taller barriers to stop people from jumping over fare gates. New York and Chicago have placed more police officers inside the transit system. City life, damaged None of this necessarily means that the old status quo on subways and buses was ideal. Some activists argue that public transit should be free and that higher taxes should cover the system’s costs; critics of this idea reply it would cause transit systems to be underfunded and unreliable. There are also thorny questions about what the consequences for fare evasion should be. Few legal experts favor jail. Drug use may offer a useful analogy: As my colleague German Lopez has pointed out, even modest penalties can have a big effect on behavior. Whatever the answer, New York’s glorious transit system, a signature part of the city, is struggling. The projected budget deficit is growing, and many regular riders say that today’s chaotic atmosphere has damaged the quality of everyday life. For more: I recommend reading Ana’s story. She also did a Q. and A. with our New York Today newsletter. A MESSAGE FROM BLAND AI AI called—and you thought it was a person. Say Hello to Bland, the most human-sounding AI in the world. Chances are, you’ve already spoken to Bland's AI without even noticing... It understands emotions, can respond in any voice or language, and already handles 1m+ phone calls simultaneously, 24/7. For enterprises, it’s been a financial game changer across sales, customer support, you name it. It’s like the perfect employee. Just give it a call yourself... Try an AI Phone Call THE LATEST NEWS 2024 Election Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Nick Hagen for The New York Times, Eric Lee/The New York Times Dueling ad strategies: Kamala Harris’s ads focus on her middle-class upbringing and accuse Donald Trump of fighting “for billionaires and large corporations,” while a pro-Trump group plans to air ads attacking Harris’s record on the border. Ahead of the presidential debate, the Trump and Harris campaigns are fighting over whether microphones will be muted when a candidate isn’t speaking. Trump’s campaign team clashed with an official at Arlington National Cemetery during the former president’s visit. Federal law prohibits political campaigning there. Harris and Trump both embrace tariffs, but to different degrees. She supports targeted tariffs; he has proposed tariffs on most foreign goods. Years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter told a magazine that her father once sawed the head off a dead whale and strapped it to the family minivan. An environmental organization is now calling for an investigation. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders used flattery and pomp to get into Trump’s good graces, Trump’s former national security adviser writes in a memoir. Jan. 6 Jack Smith, the special counsel, narrowed his Jan. 6 indictment against Trump to reflect the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity. Smith, after setbacks and delays, is signaling that he will pursue both the Jan. 6 and classified documents cases through the homestretch of the presidential campaign. A judge sentenced the first rioter to breach the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 to more than four years in prison. More on Politics Florida’s state tourism website took down resource pages for L.G.B.T.Q. travelers. “The Trumpist wing of legal thought”: A federal court in New Orleans has embraced aggressive conservative arguments, leading to major Supreme Court rulings. Middle East The brother of the freed hostage. Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Israel’s military rescued a hostage — a 52-year-old member of Israel’s Bedouin minority who was working as a guard at a kibbutz when he was abducted — from a tunnel in Gaza. Soldiers appear to have found the man by chance as they were combing through the tunnel for Hamas fighters. He is the eighth hostage to be rescued alive. Israel’s military launched a broad operation in the occupied West Bank. At least nine people had been killed, Palestinian officials said. Read the latest updates. El Al — Israel’s biggest airline — has turned a record profit this year as international carriers cut routes to the country, The Wall Street Journal reports. After weeks of concerns about a broader regional war, Hezbollah’s limited attack on Israel suggests that Iran, like its ally, wants to limit the risk of escalation. More International News In Yola, Nigeria. Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times Many African countries have excessive debt. This has stunted economic growth and caused social instability. Mexico paused diplomatic relations with the U.S. Embassy in response to criticisms by the U.S. ambassador of plans by Mexico to overhaul its judiciary. The arrest of the Telegram founder in France has raised a critical question: Can tech executives be held responsible for what happens on their platforms? Other Big Stories The U.S. job market has recovered from a pandemic loss, but the recovery has been uneven: The South is booming, while parts of the Midwest have struggled. These maps show the trends. The police in Colorado are searching for as many as 10 missing Doberman puppies after their breeder was found dead in his home. Opinions Boeing’s safety problems began when the company shifted its focus from building great planes to making money for Wall Street, Clive Irving argues. Here is a column by Thomas Edsall on Trump’s plans, Bret Stephens on worthy protest targets and Zeynep Tufekci on the Telegram controversy. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Marie Cooper Kristian Thacker for The New York Times Health: Doctors saved Marie Cooper’s life against her wishes. Her story shows the confusion around do-not-resuscitate orders. Quiz: A challenge for students heading back to school: How well did you keep up with current events this summer? Covid normalcy: Test kits sales are down and a new casual attitude has taken root in the fifth summer of the disease. Shopping: Inside one woman’s quest to map the famous Paris flea market. Lives Lived: Rudy Franchi brought classic French films to New York City and appraised pop-culture ephemera on “Antiques Roadshow.” He also fabricated stories for a tabloid newspaper, like one that claimed that John F. Kennedy was still alive. Franchi died at 85. SPORTS Jason Kelce and Travis Kelce. Julio Cortez/Associated Press N.F.L.: Amazon has signed an around $100 million deal with Travis and Jason Kelce to become the home of “New Heights,” their popular podcast. U.S. Open: Dan Evans beat Karen Khachanov in a record five-hour, 35-minute contest. Read a recap here. Keeping cool: Misting machines, more trees and retractable roofs help players and fans manage the sweltering heat during the U.S. Open. A MESSAGE FROM BLAND AI AI called—and you thought it was a person. Say Hello to Bland, the most human-sounding AI in the world. Chances are, you’ve already spoken to Bland's AI without even noticing... It understands emotions, can respond in any voice or language, and already handles 1m+ phone calls simultaneously, 24/7. For enterprises, it’s been a financial game changer across sales, customer support, you name it. It’s like the perfect employee. Just give it a call yourself... Try an AI Phone Call ARTS AND IDEAS In the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. Graham Dickie/The New York Times On New York City’s streets, a tradition of sorts has emerged: daytime dance parties with veteran D.J.s, attended by techno heads and toddlers alike. For parents who left their nightclub years behind them, the parties are a chance to share the experience with their children — and to release some energy on the dance floor. “It’s such an important part of my life that I want my kids there,” one partygoer said. More on culture Liza Minnelli Erik Carter for The New York Times Liza Minnelli met the jewelry designer Elsa Peretti in the early 1970s and has worn her pieces ever since — to Studio 54, the Oscars, even Versailles. Opera Philadelphia announced a pay-what-you-can model for the upcoming season, with tickets for all performances starting at $11. After the success of the Icon of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean is building three more megaships. As you try to secure tickets for the Oasis comeback tour, look at the timeline of Liam and Noel Gallagher’s infamous feuding. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times Try a summery tomato risotto. Squeeze more time out of your phone battery. Find relief with a good foam roller. Support your neck with the right pillow. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was unknotting. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —David P.S. Young Chung, a schoolteacher, recently completed every puzzle in The Times’s Mini Crossword archive — all 3,600 of them — in honor of the Mini’s 10th anniversary. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 29, 2024 Author Members Posted August 29, 2024 August 29, 2024 Good morning. Today, my colleague Cecilia Kang explains the next steps in the Google monopoly case. We’re also covering Telegram, journalists in Hong Kong and burgers.—David Leonhardt A model of the Android logo. Getty Images Awaiting a penalty By Cecilia Kang I cover tech policy. Google, a judge ruled earlier this month, is a monopolist. Now comes the hard part: How can its search be fixed to restore competition? Next week, the judge will hold his first hearing to consider the answer. This one could be messy. There’s a long menu of options that Amit Mehta of the Federal District Court in D.C. could choose from. He could restrict Google’s deals with companies like Apple. He could form separate companies for products like Google’s Chrome browser and its Android operating system. Or he could come up with a completely new idea. And however he tries to curb Google’s power could set a precedent for the rest of the tech industry, as the antitrust suit against Microsoft did two decades ago. The timing is tricky, too. Search is changing as corporations unveil artificial intelligence to answer more queries. In the end, Google says it will appeal anyway, which will set off another round of hearings. In today’s newsletter, we’ll explain the options that the judge has for punishing Google, and the potential benefits and drawbacks of each. What harmed competition? A demonstration of new Google search features. Amy Osborne/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The government isn’t likely to show up with concrete proposals at the first hearing on remedies, as this process is called, next Friday. It’s too early for that. Instead, the proceeding is a chance for Mehta to describe what he’s looking for. The Justice Department wants to break Google up. But there are several less drastic ideas floating around, depending on which behaviors Mehta wants to curtail. His ruling could be a guide to these possible remedies, some of which he could impose in combination. Mehta called out a few things that, he said, ran afoul of the law. Business deals that prioritize Google’s search engine on smartphones. Google paid Apple and other partners about $20 billion per year to ensure its search was the default: When an iPhone user searches for something in Apple’s browser, Google provides the results. Mehta said this helped the company illegally maintain its dominance. The judge could forbid such deals. That might be good for rivals like Microsoft, which owns the search engine Bing, or DuckDuckGo. But the judge can’t stop Apple from using Google as the default if it wants to. Forcing Google’s search on users of its own operating system. The company introduced a screen letting Android users pick a search engine after a 2020 antitrust ruling in Europe. Google could be forced to do something similar in the United States. Google’s huge trove of data. The company has a massive advantage: Its quarter century of data about searches means that it knows far better than its competitors what people are looking for online. That data makes Google’s searches better — and keeps users loyal, cementing the company’s dominance. Some antitrust activists say Mehta should force the tech giant to share that search-history data with rivals to help them catch up. But consumers might not be thrilled to learn that their search histories have been shipped to another tech conglomerate. Google controls 90 percent of search. The judge could force Google, valued at $2 trillion, to sell the Chrome browser or the Android operating system. He could stop the company from installing its search as the default option on the software, too. Seeking fairness The Google building in Manhattan John Taggart for The New York Times Mehta isn’t just looking at Google. He’ll also consider how his orders could affect other companies, restore competition or even distort markets in new ways. For instance, if he makes Google sell Android, what happens if the software ends up in the hands of another Big Tech player like Microsoft or Meta? He’ll have to weigh how his decisions will affect the future of technology. And he’ll want to do so in a way that doesn’t freak customers out. How will people accustomed to Google feel if it’s harder to find their search engine — or if they have to pay to use it? My sources tell me it could take as little as three months or more than a year to know what will happen, given that Google will appeal. In 2000, a decision to break up Microsoft was reversed the following year. The lawsuits this time could continue until the late 2020s. Google, meanwhile, will start a whole new antitrust defense next month in another case brought by the Justice Department. This one is about something completely different — its alleged monopolization of the online ad market. Related: Google’s antitrust case has opened the door to other lawsuits. Yelp sued Google yesterday, claiming that Google unfairly tilted search to favor its own local listings over Yelp’s. More on tech Pavel Durov Jim Wilson/The New York Times The founder of Telegram, a messaging platform with minimal content moderation, was charged in France with crimes related to illicit activity on the app. Chinese entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are moving to Silicon Valley for better business opportunities. Some are struggling. U.S. and Chinese officials discussed technology export controls and Taiwan in talks in Beijing. THE LATEST NEWS International In the West Bank. Nasser Nasser/Associated Press Israel’s military said it killed five militants in a gun battle in a mosque in the occupied West Bank, as a large military operation there continued. Two journalists in Hong Kong were convicted of sedition. The ruling was seen as a blow to press freedom there. Typhoon Shanshan drenched southern Japan. Wildfires in Canada last year produced more carbon emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in most countries. Only China, the U.S. and India produced more. In Germany, a woman founded her own political party, mixing right-wing nationalism and left-wing socialism. She’s shaking up politics. 2024 Election At a high school in Georgia. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are on a bus tour of Georgia, a sign that Democrats believe that she can win the state. President Biden narrowly won there in 2020. Harris and Walz will appear on CNN at 9 p.m. Eastern for the first major television interview of their presidential campaign. The Trump campaign is making a push in the Midwest. JD Vance visited Pennsylvania and Wisconsin yesterday, and Donald Trump will be in La Crosse, Wis., tonight for a town hall event. Trump reposted a crude sexual remark about Harris on social media. Trump has blamed Biden — and, by extension, Harris — for crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine. That interpretation ignores Trump’s own culpability for the state of the world, David Sanger writes. More on Politics The man who tried to assassinate Trump first showed an interest in committing acts of public violence in 2019, the F.B.I. says. His profile more closely resembles that of a mass shooter than a politically motivated assassin. The Supreme Court maintained a pause on part of Biden’s effort to forgive student debt, which he introduced after the court had rejected his more sweeping plan last year. A Kentucky man involved with the Oath Keepers and other far-right extremist groups was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6 attack. Other Big Stories A rare but dangerous mosquito-borne virus is putting some Massachusetts communities at risk. A woman who has been a doctoral student in psychology is accused of killing her friend’s newborn twin and abusing the other. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty, CNN reports. A former county official in Las Vegas was found guilty of murdering a reporter who wrote articles critical of him. A judge granted Sarah Palin a new trial in her libel lawsuit against The New York Times, saying the original trial had wrongly excluded evidence. The pandemic reshaped where jobs are in the U.S. See how jobs have changed in your county. Opinions Have you been paying attention to politics this summer? Take this quiz from Gail Collins. Harris’s campaign of joy can do more than beat Trump. It can put an end to the MAGA movement, which relies on Americans’ rage, David French argues. Here are columns by Nicholas Kristof on European overregulation and Charles Blow on Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS In Italy. Francesco Guerra for The New York Times Picnics vs. private clubs: Italians are fighting for the right to feast on the beach. Life saver: Many rural communities rely on volunteers to serve as paramedics. What happens to those areas when people stop volunteering? Social Q’s: “Should I be worried that my new boyfriend admits to being a cad?” Mental health: We might be thinking about the loneliness epidemic in the wrong way. Ask Well: Is DEET bug spray harmful? Read what to know. Lives Lived: From her cream-colored office on the third floor of Bergdorf Goodman, Betty Halbreich dressed New York’s matrons and debutantes, as well as politicians, actresses and many others. New York magazine called her “the most famous personal shopper in the world.” She died at 96. SPORTS Caitlin Clark Michael Conroy/Associated Press W.N.B.A.: The Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark broke the W.N.B.A. record for most 3-pointers by a rookie. Paris Games: The Paralympics have begun, with around 4,400 athletes from 168 countries competing. Here’s a guide to the biggest events. College football: Week 1 of the season begins tonight, and all eyes will be on Deion Sanders and Colorado. ARTS AND IDEAS Assembling a burger. Jessica Attie for The New York Times The burger, Priya Krishna and Tejal Rao write, represents America at its best: rich with history, yet always changing, pushed forward by new generations who infuse it with their own traditions and flavors. They chose 11 burgers that capture this moment in food, and in the country, including these: Lucy Goosey at Hot Dish Pantry in Milwaukee, inspired by the Midwestern Juicy Lucy, features Wisconsin Cheddar sealed between two beef patties. Made in Lagos Burger at Akara House in Brooklyn uses akara, a deep-fried Nigerian fritter of mashed beans seasoned with herbs, garlic and onion, for a new kind of veggie burger. Amelia’s Frita at Amelia’s 1931 in Miami is a twist on the classic Cuban frita — a century-old smash burger — that includes flavors of Korea and Peru. See the full list of burgers here. More on culture Ali Wong and Randall Park in the film “Always Be My Maybe.” Netflix Western pop culture has often emasculated Asian male characters. In a new crop of roles, they finally get the girl (or the guy). The Boston area hosts great Vietnamese and Peruvian food — and more. See a list of the 25 best restaurants in Boston right now. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Linda Xiao for The New York Times Grill smoky and vibrant shrimp. Project a casual cool with a slip-on shoe. Gift these books to kids starting middle school. Use a mattress topper for a fluffier night’s sleep. Make your own stickers with an electronic cutting machine. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were demonize and demonized. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 30, 2024 Author Members Posted August 30, 2024 August 30, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering college admissions after the Supreme Court’s decision — as well as Harris’s CNN interview, a drought in Namibia and a life review. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Eros Hoagland/Getty Images What will colleges report? The Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling last year upended admissions at selective colleges. Because they could no longer consider race, admissions officers — with oversight from their lawyers — had to overhaul their processes. In coming weeks, we will learn about the results. With students back on campus, more colleges will report the racial makeup of their freshman classes. The colleges already have the data; they just haven’t yet announced it (with the exception of M.I.T.). I’ve spoken frequently with university administrators about this subject in recent months. Today, I’ll offer a preview of the post-affirmative action landscape, organized around four points. 1. Variation is likely Because M.I.T. reported its results first and experienced a sharp drop in Black and Latino students, it may be natural to assume that M.I.T. will be the norm. I’m not sure it will be, though. M.I.T. isn’t a typical elite college. It focuses on STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — an area where Black and Latino underrepresentation is stark. M.I.T.’s recent announcement also contained a statistical anomaly that may have exaggerated the decline in Black and Latino students (as I explain below). As more colleges report data, people inside higher education expect a wide variety of outcomes. Some colleges will probably have big declines. Others may have only modest changes. 2. Diversity isn’t cheating Many conservatives are worried that colleges will cheat by continuing to consider race. Admissions decisions, after all, are subjective, and colleges often know an applicant’s race even though there is no longer a box to check. An article in The Atlantic last year even urged universities to defy the Supreme Court. But it would be a mistake to conclude that any college that maintains high diversity levels has broken the law. The court’s decision explicitly allows colleges to weigh the effects of race. “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. The key, Roberts added, was that the student “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual.” Remember, there are huge racial gaps in the U.S. — in health, wealth, school resources, incarceration and more. Any college that truly accounted for socioeconomic disadvantage, as more now promise to do, would end up giving credit for overcoming adversity to many underrepresented minorities. That wouldn’t be breaking the law; it would be following Roberts’s orders. Of course, it’s plausible that some colleges did cheat and secretly gave extra credit for race itself. The distinction is likely to be the subject of future lawsuits. 3. Class isn’t race There was a detail in the numbers M.I.T. released last week that might seem surprising: Even as Black and Latino representation in this year’s entering class fell sharply, the number of lower-income students rose modestly. About one quarter of M.I.T.’s first-year students come from the bottom half of the U.S. income distribution. Together, this data suggests that the Supreme Court’s decision may have most hurt upper-income Black and Latino applicants at M.I.T. — and most benefited lower-income Asian applicants. (The number of Asian students rose significantly.) I’ll leave it to others to argue about whether this combination is good, bad or some of each. It’s certainly complicated. 4. The 120% anomaly M.I.T., like many colleges, allows students to identify as having more than one race. As a result, its racial categories add up to more than 100 percent; any mixed-race student — both Black and Asian, say — counts in both categories. Still, there was a strange pattern in M.I.T.’s data. The number of mixed-race freshmen this fall plunged compared with previous years, as you can see from these numbers: Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Note: International students are excluded from all other groups. Native includes Pacific Islanders. | By The New York Times How could this be? There are two leading possibilities. First, a disproportionate number of the upper-income minority students whom M.I.T. didn’t admit this year may have been multiracial. Mixed-race families are increasingly common in well-off high schools. When these students were admitted in the past, they were counted twice in the data. And each one who no longer enrolls looks like two students in the data. Second, the timing of M.I.T.’s data collection changed this year in a notable way. In the past, M.I.T. asked students to list their race when applying. This year, it asked about race only after students decided to enroll. It’s possible, then, that students who had a real claim on being a minority but didn’t identify strongly with that group — a white student with one parent from Argentina, say, or a multiracial student with some African heritage — might have been less likely to identify as Black or Latino this year than last year, when race-based affirmative action existed. The numbers suggest that this anomaly might explain fully half the decline in underrepresented minorities. Regardless, the Black and Latino shares fell significantly, but the drop was probably smaller than the top-line data suggests. The bottom line If the overall number of Black and Latino students at selective colleges plummets this year, it will be cause for consternation. It would aggravate racial inequality because these colleges provide big economic benefits and have an outsize role in shaping the American elite. For now, the full picture remains uncertain. As we get more information, I’ll update you. THE LATEST NEWS The Harris Interview Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. CNN Kamala Harris, in her first major TV interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, defended President Biden’s record. She touted the administration’s efforts to boost manufacturing and lower prescription drug costs. Harris offered few specifics for her own policies or Day 1 plans, but she spoke generally about seeking to strengthen the middle class. See a video of the interview from CNN. She said she had no regrets about defending Biden’s competency for the job and evaded questions about her race and gender. Read more takeaways. Tim Walz, who sat alongside Harris through the interview, spoke proudly of the viral moment with his son, Gus, during the convention. But he did not engage on questions about Republican attacks on his military record. 2024 Election The Harris campaign has benefited from a surge of interest from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Some of those donors are now pressing her to drop her support for a tax on the ultrawealthy. After firefighters in Boston booed when JD Vance mentioned Donald Trump, Vance joked: “Once upon a time I was not a Trump guy either. Trust me, the president never lets me forget it.” Trump’s reposts of racially and sexually charged insults of Harris have some people asking: Will he alienate the voters he needs? Harris and Trump both have plans to address America’s affordable housing shortage: Hers include tax cuts and a benefit for first-time buyers, and his include deportations and lower interest rates. Biden’s former Senate colleagues played a more prominent role than was previously reported in pushing him out of the race. More on Politics The former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s car passed near a pipe bomb on Jan. 6, new video shows. Conservative legal challenges have blocked many of the policies that Biden saw as critical to his legacy, on issues like immigration and student loans. Trump tried to move his Manhattan criminal case into federal court, filing an unusual request three months after he was convicted in state court. International In Namibia. Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Namibia plans to butcher elephants and zebras for meat, as nearly half the country suffers a hunger crisis during a drought. Israel’s major West Bank raid killed 17 people, most of whom were militants, Israeli officials said. Kiingi Tuheitia, the king of the Maori in New Zealand, died at 69. He spent 18 years on the throne and called for unity among the country’s Indigenous tribes. Honduras will terminate its extradition treaty with the United States, after the U.S. ambassador criticized a meeting between Honduran and Venezuelan officials. The investigation into the yacht that sank off Sicily broadened to include two other crew members. Other Big Stories New York City’s transit authority is addressing fare evasion. Officers are writing tickets for people who skip paying. (The Morning wrote about the problem this week). A Boar’s Head deli meat plant linked to nine deaths had black mold, water dripping over meat and dead flies, inspectors found. More than 40 horses died on a breeding ranch in Oklahoma after eating possibly contaminated feed. The founder of Backpage, a website that promoted ads for prostitution, received a five-year sentence in a case that shut down the website. Opinions Want to empower American workers? Restrictions on both immigration and outsourcing are the best way to do so — better even than labor unions, Oren Cass argues. Trump should be scared — very scared — of debating Harris, Frank Bruni writes. Here are columns by Paul Krugman on cryptocurrency in campaign finance and John McWhorter on Harris, “joy” and race. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Robert Garrison holding a photo of himself and his son, Robert. Grant Hindsley for The New York Times Homelessness: He was determined to rescue his son from the streets. The journey was more difficult that he had imagined. Health: How does mpox spread, and who is most at risk? Here’s what scientists know. A secret history: Arjav Ezekiel is an acclaimed restaurateur. Few knew about his past as an undocumented immigrant. Wildfires: Scientists are studying how exposure to smoke might harm our health. Lives Lived: Sister Theresa Kane surprised Catholics when she delivered an address that publicly challenged Pope John Paul II to let women serve as priests. Her stand made her a leading figure among progressive Catholic women. She has died at 87. SPORTS Carlos Alcaraz Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Tennis: Carlos Alcaraz, a two-time Grand Slam winner this year, is out at the U.S. Open. Read a recap. College football: Deion Sanders and Colorado beat lower-tier powerhouse North Dakota State. N.F.L.: The San Francisco 49ers and Brandon Aiyuk agreed to a four-year, $120 million contract extension, ending months of angst between the two sides. ARTS AND IDEAS Sonia Pulido “Life reviews” — which help people systematically review their past — have been popular for decades, mostly among those at the end of their lives. Now, younger people are doing them, too. Researchers have found they help people transition between life phases, appreciate where they are and decide where they want to go. Read more about how do to a life review. More on culture Angelina Jolie Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters A biopic about Maria Callas, the opera singer, could be Angelina Jolie’s Oscar comeback. It’s getting rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival. In a new memoir, “Never Saw Me Coming,” Tanya Smith recounts her youth as a prodigy scam artist. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Slice peaches (or any fruit) for this upside-down cake. Brave these new horror novels. Repel mosquitoes. Find relief with a good foam roller. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was hawthorn. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted August 31, 2024 Author Members Posted August 31, 2024 August 31, 2024 By Melissa Kirsch Good morning. Creating a valedictory playlist can help demarcate this chapter of your life: It’s a way to mark time, to keep one period of time from bleeding indistinctly into the next. María Jesús Contreras Record keeping I am putting the finishing touches on my Summer 2024 playlist. This isn’t a collection of the summer’s hottest hits, although Chappell Roan and Charli XCX did make it on there. It’s a mix of the songs that I’ve been listening to this summer, regardless of when they came out — more Barack Obama than Billboard. I’ve been curating this playlist all summer, adding to it whenever I notice there’s a song or an album that I’ve been listening to again and again such that it’s becoming part of my life soundtrack. My Summer 2024 playlist is not meant to be listened to during the Summer of 2024. It’s for the Winter of 2024, or some far-off day in 2035, when I want to evoke this period of time. This period of time when I rediscovered Genesis and became convinced that their 1983 song “That’s All” might be the best song ever written. When I spent an entire month listening to only “Worth It” by Raye and “You’ll Accomp’ny Me” by Bob Seger until I knew every lyric and drumbeat and guitar riff by heart. When I hear these songs in the future, they’ll trigger memories from this summer. I’ll be back by the lake where a duck walked right out of the water and stood by my beach chair. I’ll be sitting on the screened-in porch drinking iced coffee while the rain blows in. By making a playlist of the season, I’m delineating a chapter of my life. I’m engineering a mechanism to induce nostalgia in the future. This dividing of life into chapters is something I’ve become more deliberate about doing as I’ve gotten older. I don’t want one season to just bleed into the next, the days losing their distinctness, vivid experiences fading as they recede into memory. Anything that can create order out of the accumulation of life lived seems useful. Sometimes I’ll just go around and take photos of my apartment so that I’ll have a record of how it looked in this moment in time: the plants and the bedsheets and the clothes piled on the chair. They’re not photos I want to look at now, but 20 years from now when I’ve forgotten about these details that are mundane but so essential to my daily life. My friend Grace has been making monthly playlists for the 10 years I’ve known her. She calls them her musical diary. “I don’t keep a written journal, but I can look back at the playlists and remember how I was feeling at that time, what was going on in my life: a breakup, a move, a low, a high,” she told me recently. This is what I want: reliable ways to conjure the feelings, the major and minor events. I feel a lot of remorse around not keeping a journal, a record of my days. I kept one as a kid, but in college, I made the error of reading those cloth-covered notebooks. It was too soon — I was so embarrassed at my young self’s hopes and concerns and insights (or lack thereof) that I took the diaries and threw them in the dumpster behind my dorm. How stupid! How rash! Ever since, any effort to keep a journal has felt doomed, a stop-and-start affair that’s always tinged with anger at my college self’s impulsivity. I like the idea of using playlists as a journal. It’s easy to do, and easy to stick with. But while I hope the songs on my playlist will evoke forgotten memories and feelings when I listen to them in the future, they’re unlikely to unleash the complicated thought processes, the quickly vanishing flashes of insight, the tiny observations that you uncover only when you actually sit down and write through them. Perhaps this weekend I’ll listen to my summer playlist and try writing out a companion journal entry, a sort of State of the Season that goes deeper into this moment than songs written by someone else ever could. For more How to keep a journal. Or consider a commonplace book. A log book works, too. In 2022, readers of The Morning made a big, collaborative summer playlist. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Music Liam Gallagher, left, and his brother Noel. EPA, via Shutterstock Oasis, which broke up 15 years ago, announced a tour next summer. Fans spoke to The Guardian about what the reunion means to them. (See a timeline of Liam and Noel Gallagher’s sibling rivalry.) Laurie Anderson’s latest album, “Amelia,” traces Amelia Earhart’s final flight. “It unfolds as something between a song cycle, an oratorio and a vintage radio drama,” Jon Pareles writes. The brother of Joey Ramone and the widow of Johnny Ramone, each of whom controls half of the punk band’s intellectual property rights, have filed lawsuits against each other. The pianist and scholar Robert Levin improvises over Mozart’s work — just, he argues, as the composer himself would have done in his time. Film and TV The Venice Film Festival commenced on Wednesday, offering a first look at some of the films that may dominate awards season. That includes “Maria,” a biopic of the opera diva Maria Callas, starring Angelina Jolie. The fourth season of “Only Murders in the Building,” now on Hulu, knowingly deploys a number of celebrity guest stars. It can be overwhelming, Esther Zuckerman writes in her review. The gap between seasons of TV shows are getting longer, James Poniewozik writes — “The Rings of Power” took nearly two years to return, and “Severance” took three. “The Deliverance,” a horror movie from “Precious” director Lee Daniels, is one of six films Times critics are talking about this week. Other Culture Stories A family accused a Miami art gallery of going to elaborate lengths to pass off forged paintings as authentic Andy Warhols. Meghan Markle has invested in Cesta Collective, which specializes in basket bags that are handwoven by a collective of women in Rwanda. “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is a modern reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats.” Watch four dancers from the reinvented classic. THE LATEST NEWS Abdul Rahman Abu Al-Jidyan, a nearly 1-year-old boy, is the first person to contract polio in Gaza in 25 years. Ramadan Abed/Reuters The Israeli military and Hamas will observe brief pauses in fighting, starting Sunday, to allow 640,000 children to be vaccinated for polio, U.N. officials said. Brazil blocked the social network X after its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with a judge’s orders to suspend certain accounts. The judge threatened steep fines for Brazilians who continued to use the site. President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed the head of Ukraine’s Air Force, days after one of the country’s first F-16 fighters crashed — possibly because of friendly fire. The share of Black first-year students declined at two elite Massachusetts universities, an early hint of the effects of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban. Patients taking the obesity drug Wegovy were less likely to die from Covid, a large clinical trial found. The result surprised and excited researchers. A driver struck and killed the N.H.L. star Johnny Gaudreau and his brother Matthew as they rode bicycles near their family home in New Jersey. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. CULTURE CALENDAR By Alexis Soloski 🎬 “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Friday) There is nothing unusual about Hollywood disinterring past intellectual property. These days, most nationwide releases come coated in grave dust. But few mainstream movies are as wildly singular as Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice,” a giddy, gothic orgy of macabre imagination and morbid practical effects. Maybe its singularity will beget a decent sequel. Burton’s follow-up reunites much of the original cast — Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara — and adds Jenna Ortega (the star of “Wednesday”) as the daughter of Ryder’s indelible Lydia Deetz. If that doesn’t tempt you to get your fleshbags into a theater, what will? RECIPE OF THE WEEK Bryan Gardner for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Saffron salmon kababs There’s an art to grilling fish that can elude even the most seasoned home cook. How do you keep it from sticking, from overcooking, from catching on fire? Kabab it! Threading chunks of fish onto skewers makes them easy to move around the grill, and keeping the fish pieces small means they’ll cook quickly and evenly. In Naz Deravian’s Iranian saffron salmon kababs, a fragrant marinade imbues salmon fillets with a tangy, spicy flavor in only 30 minutes — so you don’t need to plan much ahead. If you like, you can thread quick-cooking vegetables onto the skewers. Or stick to salmon chunks alone, letting their saffron-stained color shine. REAL ESTATE Chris Smith and Emily Porat in Brooklyn. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times The Hunt: Two first-time buyers wanted a sunny place in Brooklyn with a decent kitchen and not too many stairs. Which home did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $700,000: A Queen Anne-style brick house in Columbus, Ohio; a two-bedroom condominium in Phoenix; or a 1925 Craftsman house in Oklahoma City. LIVING Doug Emhoff, left, the vice president’s husband. Todd Heisler/The New York Times Domestic life: This election cycle has highlighted a subtler aspect of masculinity: husbandliness. A wide net: Some people are setting their locations on dating apps to different cities (or even countries) hoping to broaden their romantic prospects. Shopping: Labor Day “deals” are everywhere this weekend. Here are the ones Wirecutter’s deals experts are actually excited about. Travel: For a rustic taste of Spain, head for the hills of La Rioja. Vocalizing: Can grunting during exercise give you an edge? ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Do you need a purse for your water bottle? A giant water bottle can be cumbersome and heavy. Our advice? Consider a water bottle carrier. (Yes, like the ones you may have seen all over your social media feeds.) Wirecutter experts put six of them to the test. And while most of the carriers were pretty uncomfortable to wear, I was surprised to find that a spacious, well-designed carrier can be a game changer. It lets me enjoy my walks sans achy wrists, all the while inching toward my daily hydration goals. — Elissa Sanci Wirecutter is giving away one of its favorite water bottles — and a bundle of other expert-approved picks for staying cool. (Terms and conditions apply.) GAME OF THE WEEK Notre Dame quarterback Riley Leonard hands off to Devyn Ford at practice. John Mersits/Cal Sport Media via AP Images Notre Dame vs. Texas A&M, college football: College football will be quite different this season. That’s because, for the first time, the sport has a proper playoff. Twelve teams will make the postseason bracket, including at least one from a smaller conference, which means teams outside the sport’s elite inner circle will have a shot at a championship. Notre Dame is a storied program, but hasn’t been part of that inner circle in quite some time; its last N.C.A.A. title came in 1988. Will this year be any different? Notre Dame begins the season ranked No. 7, with an easier schedule than many other top contenders. But it faces a potential spoiler tonight in No. 20 Texas A&M, whose deep and talented defense could punish Notre Dame’s inexperienced offensive line. 7:30 p.m. Eastern on ABC NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was axiomatic. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted September 1, 2024 Author Members Posted September 1, 2024 September 1, 2024 Good morning. Today, my colleague Caity Weaver explains an intractable problem inside America’s change purses. We’re also covering hostages, psychiatric hospitals and a literary quiz. —David Leonhardt Jamie Chung for The New York Times Pound-foolish By Caity Weaver I write for The New York Times Magazine. I have good news and I have bad news. Actually, I have crazy news and I have bad news. Actually, all the news I have is bad, but some of it is also crazy. Before you become totally freaked out, all the news I’m describing here is about pennies; it’s nothing life and death. But you do need to buckle up. If you are reading this and live in America, or used to live in America, or maybe just went to America one time many years ago, then you are almost certainly performing unpaid labor for the U.S. government and have been for years. How? By storing some of the billions of pennies the U.S. Mint makes every year that virtually no one uses. Why are we still making tons (many thousands of tons) of pennies if no one uses them? That’s a sensible question with a psychotic answer: We have to keep making all these pennies — over $45 million worth last year — because no one uses them. In fact, it could be very bad if we did. When you insert a quarter into a soda machine, that quarter eventually finds its way back to a bank, from which it can be redistributed to a store’s cash register and handed out as change — maybe even to you, who can put it into a soda machine again and start the whole process over. That’s beautiful. (Please be mindful of your soft drink consumption.) But few of us ever spend pennies. We mostly just store them. The 1-cent coins are wherever you’ve left them: a glass jar, a winter purse, a RAV4 cup holder, a five-gallon water cooler dispenser, the couch. Many of them are simply on the ground. But take it from me, a former cashier: Cashiers don’t have time to scrounge on the sidewalk every time they need to make change. That is where the Mint comes in. Every year it makes a few billion more pennies to replace the ones everyone is thoughtlessly, indefinitely storing and scatters them like kudzu seeds across the nation. You — a scientist of some kind, possibly — might think an obvious solution now presents itself: Why not encourage people to use the pennies they have lying around instead of manufacturing new ones every year? We can’t! Or, anyway, we’d better not. According to a Mint report, if even a modest share of our neglected pennies suddenly returned to circulation, the result would be a “logistically unmanageable” dilemma for Earth’s wealthiest nation. As in, the penny tsunami could overwhelm government vaults. That’s not great, but at the end of the day we’re talking only about pennies. How much could a penny cost to make? A penny? If only we lived in such a paradise. Unfortunately, one penny costs more than three pennies (3.07 cents at last count) to make and distribute! When I learned this, I lost my mind. Whose fault is this? And who can make it stop? I spent months pleading for answers from government officials, former Mint employees, numismatists, economists, scientists, scrap-metal industrialists, souvenir-elongated-penny machinists, historians, businesspeople, poverty researchers and even Canadians. Everyone said the same thing: Only Congress can retire the American 1-cent coin. Wait, actually, there is (maybe) good news: Everyone might be wrong. While writing an article about all of this for The Times Magazine, I’m pretty sure I found a loophole buried deep in the forgotten annals of the U.S. legal code that could end this pointless penny plague. I think there is one person in the United States who can unilaterally kill the penny this afternoon if he or she wants to. It’s not the president of the United States or the director of the Mint or the head of Coinstar, the private coin-recycling company that has become a crucial cog in the U.S. monetary system (though I had a lovely long talk with him). In fact, it’s probably not anyone you would think of. Find out who in the magazine story. And if you are a penny lover, there is happy news for you, too. Since it first began issuing 1-cent coins in 1793, the United States has produced about half a trillion of them — far more than the number of stars in the Milky Way. Even if we get rid of the penny, there will be plenty to go around forever. THE LATEST NEWS Israel-Hamas War The Hostages Families Forum, via Associated Press Israel said that the bodies of six hostages were found in a tunnel in Gaza and blamed Hamas for their deaths. Some in Israel criticized the government for not securing a deal to release the hostages. Five of those captured had been at a dance music festival in southern Israel, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American citizen. Health workers in Gaza began a polio vaccination drive after Hamas and Israel agreed to pauses in the fighting to allow vaccinations to take place. “He couldn’t understand the danger”: A family in the occupied West Bank mourned the death of a relative with mental illness they said had been killed during an Israeli raid this past week. War in Ukraine Russia long avoided sending young conscripts to the front lines. Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region upended that practice. Residents of the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk are evacuating daily. Kyiv hoped that its incursion would draw Russian forces away, but they are closing in. More International News In Maracaibo, Venezuela. Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times Around a quarter of the residents of Maracaibo — Venezuela’s second-largest city — have moved, some driven to the U.S. and elsewhere in South America by political and economic instability. The rape and murder of a junior doctor in Kolkata has highlighted subpar security and grueling working conditions at India’s hospitals. The mayor of Paris said the Olympic rings that were installed on the Eiffel Tower for the Games would become a permanent part of the monument. 2024 Election The Trump campaign, through interviews with YouTubers and internet streamers, is courting young men who have been regarded as unreachable. The election has soured old friendships in Silicon Valley, as some tech leaders become vocal about their support for Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal reports. The campaigns of Kamala Harris and Trump, when combined with their super PACs, have raised $1.3 billion. See a list of their biggest donors. Other Big Stories Acadia Healthcare’s Park Royal hospital in Florida. Michael Adno for The New York Times Acadia Healthcare — a leading American psychiatric hospital chain — is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found. For decades, the U.S. government has encouraged farmers to spread city sewage on farmland as fertilizer. Some scientists now say that sludge could contain toxic chemicals. Boar’s Head temporarily closed its plant in a small Virginia town after it was linked to a listeria outbreak. Residents are worried about the future of the local economy. The rapper Fatman Scoop, who performed the underground club favorite “Be Faithful,” died at 56 after collapsing onstage during a performance. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Did Harris’s first major TV interview as a presidential nominee help her campaign? Yes. Harris’s interview was not flashy, but it demonstrated her levelheadedness. “A White House run by a pragmatic lawyer … is fairly dull; a good thing, at least for those of us who prefer our president to be working instead of hamming it up for the cameras,” Jill Filipovic writes for The Daily Beast. No. Harris did not tell voters where she stood on important topics. “If Harris’s campaign is about values, but she is unwilling to more forcefully champion women’s rights and the value of Palestinian lives, she risks making some wonder just what those values are,” The Guardian’s Moira Donegan writes. FROM OPINION President Biden needs to take steps toward outlawing the death penalty, even if he fails in the short term, the editorial board writes. We should learn to live without air-conditioning, both to slow climate change and to adapt to it, Stan Cox argues. Here is a column by Nicholas Kristof on working-class voters. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Bea Bongiasca ‘Brat’ stones: Lime green is the color of the summer. That’s great news for the gemstone peridot. Most clicked: The Morning’s most popular feature in August asked if driving high is as dangerous as driving drunk. ‘Retailtainment’: Mall landlords are turning to companies like Hasbro and Mattel for themed attractions. Routine: How a soberish writer spends her Sundays. Vows: On Kobe Bryant Day, a celebration of love and basketball. Lives Lived: Leonard Riggio was a brash and literary-minded businessman who, in founding Barnes & Noble, transformed the business of selling books. He was cast as both a hero and a villain for doing so. He died at 83. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Illustration by Max Guther. Concept by Alex Merto. Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine. BOOKS Hania Kmieć Kindergarten: These books will help prepare children for their first day of school. Quiz: Can you guess these novels that originally got bad reviews in The Times? Our editors’ picks: “Someone Like Us,” about a journalist investigating the criminal record of the man he assumes is his father, and six other books. Times best sellers: Jodi Picoult’s historical novel “By Any Other Name” is a No. 1 debut on the hardcover list. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Experience the restorative power of a gingery tea cake. Play these games on Labor Day. Travel with your pet. Wash your down jacket. THE WEEK AHEAD What to Watch For Tomorrow is Labor Day. Jury selection for Hunter Biden’s tax trial is set to begin on Thursday. The Toronto International Film Festival begins on Thursday. The U.S. jobs report for August is released on Friday. The U.S. Open women’s singles final is on Saturday. Meal Plan David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Vivian Lui. In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Ali Slagle offers a summer recipe scrapbook of easy meals that take around 20 minutes to make, including shrimp bathed in olive oil, cumin and cashew yogurt rice, and sardines on buttered brown bread. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were farting, graffitiing, grafting, rafting and tariffing. Can you put eight historical events — including the performances of Mozart, the conquests of the Mongols, and the creation of the Slinky — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Editor’s note: The Interview is off this week. It will return next week. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted September 2, 2024 Author Members Posted September 2, 2024 September 2, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning, and happy Labor Day. Today, we tell you about the brand-new Connections Bot. We’re also covering protests in Israel, elections in East Germany and the great Lego spill. The New York Times A Connections score WordleBot, introduced in 2022, has become one of the The Times’s most popular features. Every month, it receives millions of visits from readers who want feedback on their attempt to solve each day’s five-letter word. Now the designers of that bot have created a new one — for the Connections game. I know that The Morning’s audience includes many passionate game players, and I want to devote today’s holiday newsletter to a quick description of the new Connections Bot. It also has a larger significance: It includes the first English text generated by A.I. that The Times newsroom will regularly publish. The purple bonus I’ve had access to an internal version of the bot in recent weeks and have had fun playing with it. (If you don’t yet play Connections, a very brief description is: You must separate 16 terms into four categories, with four terms in each category, and there is only one solution that works. The trick is that one category — as you can see below with this “STADIUMS” category — often has five or more potential answers.) The New York Times As with Wordle, you first play the game and then visit the bot for feedback. Once you do, you find out how your performance compared with that of other players, and you receive a skill score, up to 99. It’s based mostly on how many mistakes you made, but it also awards extra credit if you started by solving what the Times Games team considers to be the hardest categories — starting with the purple category and followed by blue. The New York Times (Related: Connections die-hards may enjoy watching this video by Hank Green, a writer who developed his own “hard mode” for Connections, which requires solving purple first.) After the bot gives you a skill score and some other information, the A.I. feature comes next. It uses artificial intelligence to guess what players were thinking when they made incorrect guesses. I find it delightful: The New York Times I asked Eve Washington — a graphics editor with The Times’s Upshot section, who helped create the bot — what surprised her about the process, and she told me that it helped her feel better about the days when she doesn’t solve the puzzle. “Connections can be a hard game!” Eve said, pointing out that the solve rate is below 50 percent some days. “But knowing that most people were feeling stuck reminded me I was not alone, and made the game more fun,” Eve added. “It took the pressure off of playing a perfect game and instead created joy in discovering all of the unique ways that people tried to reason through the puzzle.” When I asked her what she hoped other people would get from the bot, Eve replied, “I hope that people feel seen by the bot.” Next steps: You can read a user guide’s to the bot, written by my colleagues at The Upshot — or you can simply play Connections and then visit the bot. THE LATEST NEWS Israel-Hamas War Protesters in Israel. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times Workers in Israel are calling for Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a cease-fire deal for the release of hostages in Gaza. Protesters have flooded Israeli streets to demand a deal after the Israeli military announced it recovered the body of six hostages in Gaza. The military said Hamas killed the hostages with short-range gunshots in the days before their bodies were found. Hamas said they died by Israeli bullets, but it didn’t give evidence. Americans grieved the killing of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage. Read more about the six hostages. Israeli leaders are divided about how to fight Hamas and get the hostages home. A Hamas handbook, found by the Israeli military and reviewed by The Times, reveals a yearslong effort to build a military operation in tunnels underneath Gaza. War in Ukraine In Kyiv. Oksana Parafeniuk for The New York Times “These children are crying for help”: A schoolteacher describes instructing children in Kyiv. Many of them have fled the frontline or lost family in the fighting. A photographer traveled around 10,000 miles through Ukraine during the first year of the war. He shared his images with CNN. More International News In Germany, the far-right AfD party is surging in the former communist east. It is on course to win one state election and is running a close second in another, projections showed. A man in southern France is accused of drugging his wife and inviting dozens of men to rape her over almost a decade. Today, 51 men will go on trial. Pope Francis — who is 87 and has been battling health issues — is about to undertake an 11-day tour of Asia, the longest of his tenure. 2024 Election Tim Walz Stephen Maturen/Getty Images Tim Walz, after a whirlwind month, returned to the venue that helped propel his profile: the Minnesota State Fair. JD Vance has gone on the attack for Donald Trump, endearing him to his boss. But polls show that the number of Americans who dislike Vance continues to grow. In speeches, Trump often wanders between topics. He insists there is an art to stitching them together. Other Big Stories Hotel workers in cities including San Francisco and Boston went on strike after their union and hotel companies failed to come to an agreement in contract negotiations. Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite-internet service, told Brazil’s telecom agency that it would not comply with orders to block X in the country. Opinions Michael Roth, a college president, hopes his campus will be even more political than last year. Young people are disenchanted with politicians because too much of government spending goes to baby boomers, C. Eugene Steuerle and Glenn Kramon write. Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Harris and Trump. Here is a column by David French on loneliness. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Eden Bowen Montgomery, an interior designer. Andrea Morales for The New York Times Dorm design: Some parents are paying more for dorm room interior designers than they are for college tuition. The great spill: Nearly five million Lego pieces fell out of a shipping container and into the sea in 1997. The pieces are still showing up on beaches. Maine: A Deaf man killed in a mass shooting didn’t get to see the third season of the camp he started. Twenty-two children did, including his own. Tipping: Americans are being asked to tip more often and in more places than ever before. It may soon get worse. Happy birthday, eggs! Women are throwing parties to celebrate taking charge of their fertility futures. Ask Vanessa: “Who can pull off a jean jacket?” A funnel cake macchiato? Coffee makers are in a battle for who can come up with the craziest, calorie-laden, not-really-coffee drink. Metropolitan Diary: One night on top of the world. Lives Lived: Simon Verity was a British stone carver whose works including the statues that adorn the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. He died at 79. SPORTS Coco Gauff and Emma Navarro. Jamie Squire/Getty Images U.S. Open: The American Emma Navarro ousted defending champion Coco Gauff in front of a star-studded crowd. Read a recap. W.N.B.A.: Chicago Sky star Angel Reese set the league’s single-season rebounding record. College football: U.S.C. outlasted L.S.U. in the holiday weekend’s last premier game, 27-20. The Tigers have lost three straight season openers under Brian Kelly. ARTS AND IDEAS The New York Times The Books desk has put together a list of anticipated fiction and poetry works coming this fall. Here are some upcoming releases: “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney: About two brothers — one a competitive chess player, the other a lawyer — who are forced to confront their strained relationship in the wake of their father’s death. “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” by Haruki Murakami: Based on a 44-year-old short story, this novel is about an unnamed male narrator who is still grieving over the childhood disappearance of his first love. “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner: A thriller about a disgraced F.B.I. agent turned freelance operative who infiltrates a rural French commune of environmental anarchists. “Playground” by Richard Powers: An expansive novel set on a French Polynesian island that explores the effects of A.I. and climate change on humanity. Read The Times’s fall fiction preview. More on culture Ryan Seacrest and Vanna White. Philip Cheung for The New York Times Ryan Seacrest will take over as host of “Wheel of Fortune” from Pat Sajak next week. Take a behind-the-scenes look at the change. “English Teacher,” a new FX sitcom that begins today, handles the educational culture wars with a light touch. Read James Poniewozik’s review. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Armando Rafael for The New York Times Roast tofu for a tangy and spicy sheet-pan dish. Eat these things for a long and healthy life. Clean crumbs with a good hand-held vacuum. Ski without blisters thanks to these socks. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was handbook. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted September 4, 2024 Author Members Posted September 4, 2024 September 3, 2024 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering the presidential candidates’ positions on taxes — plus, Israel, China’s economy and European tourism. Donald Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times Harris and Trump on taxes Today, we are starting a series called The Stakes covering the major issues of the campaign. Regardless of who wins the election, the next president will quickly have to deal with major changes to the tax code. That’s because a set of tax cuts enacted by Donald Trump in 2017 will expire next year, and Congress will decide which tax cuts to keep, end or expand. Of all the campaign policy issues, this one is the most likely to hurt, or help, your finances. Trump has proposed tax changes that would largely benefit the wealthy and corporations. He has also called for new tariffs — taxes on foreign goods — that would raise prices for everyone. Kamala Harris, like President Biden before her, has promised to reduce taxes for lower and middle earners and increase taxes on the rich. She has not proposed new tariffs, although she has not ruled them out. Below, I’ll explain how these plans could affect you. This newsletter is the first in a series we’ll run between now and Election Day. In it, Times journalists will focus on the policy stakes of the 2024 election — and how life would be different under a Harris administration or a Trump administration. We’ll examine other subjects, including abortion, democracy and immigration, in future newsletters. The tax cuts Trump campaigned in 2016 on a promise to slash tax rates. He delivered tax cuts in his first year in office. The 2017 cuts largely benefited the wealthy and corporations. But they also included some reductions for low- and middle-income Americans. Most of the 2017 cuts will expire next year, and members of Congress are preparing for a fight. Trump wants to extend everything — and go further. He has proposed eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security benefits and reducing the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, from 21 percent. He argues the cut would leave businesses with more money to grow, spend and hire, helping the economy. Trump’s plan would add $5.8 trillion to the debt over 10 years, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. That would expand a national debt and a budget deficit that many economists already consider concerningly large. Harris says she would leave the 2017 tax cuts in place for people earning up to $400,000 per year but raise rates for those who earn more. She argues that the rich can afford higher taxes to pay for policies that help everyone else, including an expanded child tax credit for parents. Like Trump, she favors eliminating taxes on tips. Harris’s plan would add $1.2 trillion to the debt over 10 years, the Penn Wharton Budget Model found. She has promised to reduce the deficit but has not specified how she would make up for the budget shortfall in her current proposals. Vice President Kamala Harris Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times The tariffs Over the past decade, Democrats and Republicans have shifted from the bipartisan free trade paradigm of the 1990s and 2000s. They have increased tariffs on foreign industries that produce cheaper goods than their U.S. counterparts. For example, Biden has imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric cars. Trump wants to go further. He has suggested a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all foreign goods, along with a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China. Harris comes from the Biden administration, which has used tariffs on a more limited basis than Trump has proposed. She has criticized Trump’s tariffs as too broad — describing them as “a Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication.” Supporters of tariffs argue that they would not increase prices — that foreign businesses would eat the cost instead of passing it on to consumers. But historically that’s not true. In fact, the purpose of a tariff is to increase prices. American products are generally more expensive than those made in China, Mexico and other low-income countries because labor costs are higher here. Tariffs try to level the playing field by increasing prices for foreign goods. In a recent interview with NBC News, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, argued that the tariffs would reinvigorate U.S. production. “Anything that you lose on the tariff from the perspective of the consumer, you gain in higher wages, so you’re ultimately much better off,” Vance claimed. New tariffs could also raise revenue, but not enough to make up for the deficits from either candidate’s tax cuts. The plans’ impact How would the tax plans affect actual people? A middle-class household with $80,000 in income would gain $1,700 after taxes under Trump’s plan and $2,200 under Harris’s, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. A household in the top 0.1 percent, with $14 million in income, would gain $377,000 under Trump and lose $167,000 under Harris. Those numbers, however, do not include the impact of tariffs. If they are included, Trump’s plan would actually reduce a middle-class household’s after-tax income by $1,700, the Peterson Institute for International Economics found. Wealthy households’ after-tax income would still increase. Since Harris hasn’t proposed new tariffs, her numbers are unchanged. How much of this will happen? Federal law allows the president to unilaterally impose tariffs, making at least some new ones likely. The tax cut extensions are less certain. They require congressional approval, so the winners of this year’s 468 House and Senate elections will play a big role in dictating your future tax rates. Related: Republicans often enact tax cuts that are temporary, but once people get used to paying less, it becomes hard for Democrats to reverse them. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called this the “tax doom loop.” More on the election The alliance between Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the result of six weeks of behind-the-scenes discussions. Read about how the partnership took shape. Vance has been misrepresenting some of Harris’s policies. Here’s a fact check. Many of Nikki Haley’s supporters dreaded having to vote for either Trump or Biden. Harris’s entry into the race has changed their calculus. The discussion about misinformation online has long focused on the right. In recent weeks, however, the left has also been sharing conspiracy theories. THE LATEST NEWS Israel-Hamas War The funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to maintain his conditions for a cease-fire in Gaza in his first news conference since the protests that followed the recovery of six hostages’ bodies. “Finally, you’re free”: Thousands gathered in Jerusalem for the funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American citizen and one of the six hostages found over the weekend. Biden, when asked whether Netanyahu was doing enough to secure a deal to free the hostages, simply replied, “No.” The families of several American hostages still held in Gaza called for an immediate cease-fire agreement. “More military pressure brings more dead hostages,” the father of one captive said. Britain announced that it would suspend the export of some weapons to Israel. China A collapse in real estate has put pressure on the Chinese economy. Consumers have become increasingly frugal and businesses are cutting costs. Record rainfall has spoiled crops and caused the cost of vegetables to soar across China. Snapping turtles, tissue boxes and college students looking for part-time jobs: China has a long, unusual list of possible national security threats. More International News A Russian state media photo taken in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Sputnik Vladimir Putin is visiting Mongolia in defiance of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. The U.S. seized an airplane owned by Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. It was bought in violation of sanctions, the Justice Department said. Pope Francis traveled to Indonesia, where Muslim-Christian relations are strained and some Catholics face discrimination. Immigration An Ohio town is in the middle of the immigration debate. Employers were thrilled when Haitians filled open jobs. Then an immigrant driver was involved in a fatal school bus crash. Migrants in New York City shelters are struggling to get mail delivered. Important documents are getting lost or delayed. Other Big Stories In Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Loren Elliott for The New York Times Landslides in the California town of Rancho Palos Verdes are swallowing multimillion dollar homes. Extreme heat and flooding from climate change are accelerating the deterioration of bridges, engineers say. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is struggling to become a profit-driven company and address concerns about the technology’s safety. Opinions To beat Harris, Trump needs to run on his record instead of focusing on barbs, Senator Lindsey Graham writes. Harris needs to break from Biden on policy to win, James Carville argues. College students need to grow up and schools need to let them, Rita Koganzon writes. “I paid my kid $100 to read a book”: Mireille Silcoff explains why. Listen to Ezra Klein talk about psychedelics and meaning on his show. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Near Keene, N.Y. Anna Watts for The New York Times Beauty and danger: New York’s swimming holes, tucked into forests and often unmarked on maps, offer relief during hot summers — but also pose risks. Colombia: Watch whales and greet them with stories, dancing and music. “Pinnacle Man”: He was found frozen near the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania in 1977. His identity remained a mystery — until now. Lives Lived: Virginia Ogilvy served Queen Elizabeth II for nearly 50 years as the only American-born member of her inner circle of advisers and close friends known as the ladies-in-waiting. She died at 91. SPORTS College football: Florida State lost to Boston College. The 0-2 start for Florida State is a disappointing turn for a team many predicted to win its conference. M.L.B.: The New York Yankees slugger Juan Soto will become a free agent this offseason and could command a contract worth $560 million, our expert projects. U.S. Open: The No. 1 seeds Iga Swiatek and Jannik Sinner advanced yesterday, and four Americans — two men and two women — are into the quarterfinals. Read an update. N.F.L.: The San Francisco 49ers rookie Ricky Pearsall will miss at least the first four games of the season after he was shot during an attempted robbery last weekend, the team announced. ARTS AND IDEAS In Málaga, Spain. Jon Nazca/Reuters This summer, in popular European destinations, visitors became the targets of a tourism backlash. Some residents protested with hunger strikes against developments and took the streets in thousands; others sprayed tourists with water. Local officials threatened to cut off water to illegal vacation rentals. Read about how the anger played out in destinations like Amsterdam, Barcelona and Santorini. More on culture Gao Zhen, a Chinese artist who has drawn international acclaim for works critiquing the Cultural Revolution, has been detained in China, his brother and artistic partner said. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who are still in the middle of an acrimonious split, are both at this year’s Venice Film Festival. They have been kept apart, The Washington Post reports. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Johnny Miller for The New York Times Pair pork tenderloin with a nutty tahini and citrus slaw. Care for your new tattoo. Pick the best time to get a flu shot. Pop a bottle of wine with a good corkscrew. Unwind in a comfy robe. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was conjoined. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —German Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted September 5, 2024 Author Members Posted September 5, 2024 September 4, 2024 By David Leonhardt Good morning. Today, we offer a portrait of swing voters — and are also covering Ukraine’s cabinet, a brain quiz and contemporary dance. In New Hampshire. Sophie Park for The New York Times The uncommitted 18 percent About 18 percent of American voters have not made up their minds between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, recent polls suggest. Some members of this 18 percent say they lean toward one of the two candidates without having a firm preference. Others say they don’t lean toward either. Yet history suggests that many of these Americans will vote — and will ultimately support the Democratic or Republican nominee. Once they do, they will probably decide the presidential election. In today’s newsletter, I’ll offer a portrait of the country’s uncommitted voters. Young moderates of color A major problem for President Biden’s re-election campaign was his weakness among young voters and voters of colors. A Democratic candidate typically needs to win these groups in a landslide, and Biden wasn’t on pace to do so. Harris is faring much better, which is why the race seems virtually tied. (Nate Silver’s forecast model calls Trump a slight favorite because Trump is stronger in swing states than he is nationwide, while The Economist’s model considers Harris’s national lead large enough to make her a slight favorite.) Still, even with Harris’s progress among younger voters and those who are Asian, Black, Hispanic or Native American, many remain undecided. As a group, the uncommitted 18 percent of the electorate is less white and younger than decided voters, New York Times/Siena College polling shows: Source: New York Times/Siena College polls, Aug. 2024 If you assume that most swing voters are disaffected liberals because of their youth and diversity, however, you will be wrong. For one thing, uncommitted voters are slightly more likely to be male than decided voters are. Most also do not have a four-year college degree, and working-class voters tend to be more socially conservative. Source: New York Times/Siena College polls, Aug. 2024 Overall, swing voters are more likely to identify as conservative than liberal, a potential advantage for Trump. Most swing voters, not surprisingly, consider themselves moderates, separate polling by YouGov has found. By The New York Times | Source: Economist/YouGov nationwide polls, Aug. 2024 The top issues As for the issues that matter most to swing voters, pocketbook economics is No. 1 by far. Loyal supporters of Harris or Trump, by comparison, name issues like abortion, climate change, civil rights or immigration more often than undecided voters do: By The New York Times | Source: Economist/YouGov nationwide polls, Aug. 2024 This year’s election is so close that those other issues might still sway enough voters to matter. That’s why the Harris campaign emphasizes both the Republican Party’s unpopular abortion position and the continued flip-flopping from Trump about his own views. It’s also why the Trump campaign blames Harris for the surge in illegal immigration during the Biden administration. But neither abortion nor immigration matters to as many swing voters as economic issues do. The knowledge gap Poll results point to another key point about uncommitted voters: They are more eager to hear about Harris and her plans than about Trump and his. Trump has spent nearly a decade as the Republican Party’s leader, and even longer as a celebrity. Most Americans feel they know who he is. Many adore him. Many others despise him. Those in the middle generally don’t like Trump but are open to voting for him. Harris is not as well known. As a result, much of the campaign’s final two months will revolve around trying to define her, positively or negatively. Two recent experiments by Democratic-leaning researchers, for example, found that Harris’s ads were better at swaying voters when they focused on her rather than Trump. “Voters still have a lot to learn about Vice President Harris and are looking for a hopeful vision of the future, not just more attacks on a well-known figure,” concluded Blueprint, a firm that surveyed thousands of voters’ views about six hypothetical ads for Harris. Likewise, two political scientists — David Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Josh Kalla of Yale — found that the most effective messages for Harris portrayed her as a typical Democrat who would protect Social Security and Medicare, expand abortion access, reduce the cost of living and so on. “Attacking Trump simply isn’t as effective for Democrats as praising Harris,” Broockman and Kalla wrote. Trump’s campaign has come to a similar conclusion, albeit from the opposite perspective. “This is a moment in the message arc of us seeking to define her,” one Trump adviser told The Washington Post. Trump is “a defined candidate,” the adviser said. I know that some readers will be surprised to hear that 18 percent of voters still haven’t decided between Harris and Trump, given their stark differences. But remember that many Americans don’t follow politics as closely as you may. This year’s campaign has also been an unusual one, in which one party picked a nominee who didn’t spend many months running in primaries and talking with voters. Above all, swing voters seem to want to know more about that nominee. Related: Times Opinion imagines that it’s Nov. 6, the morning after Election Day, and Ross Douthat explains how Harris won, while David Brooks explains how Trump won. More on the election Harris’s campaign, in a sign of financial strength, is giving around $25 million to help elect Democrats to Congress and other down-ballot offices. Trump commuted a man’s life sentence in 2021. This past spring, the man was convicted of assaulting his wife, becoming the latest Trump clemency beneficiary to get in legal trouble again. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name will remain on the ballot in Michigan even though Kennedy wants it removed, a judge ruled. Trump campaign workers in Florida called the police last week, thinking their offices were bugged. The devices they found appear to have been part of a prank. Stephen Colbert analyzed (and joked about) Harris’s lead in the polls. THE LATEST NEWS War in Ukraine In Poltava, Ukraine. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times Russia pounded Ukraine with a second day of deadly strikes. Yesterday, missiles struck a military academy and a hospital in eastern Ukraine. More than 50 people were killed. Volodymyr Zelensky is planning a major cabinet shake-up. Ukraine’s foreign minister and other senior officials have offered to resign. Russia’s ballistic missiles, which can travel at supersonic speeds, give Ukrainians little time to find shelter. Zelensky asked Western allies to send stronger defense systems. Politics Linda Sun and her husband, Chris Hu. Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times Federal prosecutors accused Linda Sun, a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, of acting illegally to help China’s government in exchange for payments and other benefits. Tim Sheehy, the Republican Senate nominee in Montana, repeated racist stereotypes about Native Americans, calling them “drunk at 8 a.m.” at a private fund-raiser last year. In a memoir, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writes about her enslaved ancestors, her daughter’s autism and working at the Supreme Court. Read The Times’s review. In American elections, a candidate runs unopposed in half of all races for partisan offices, an analysis found. Republicans win most of those uncontested seats. Israel-Hamas War U.S. prosecutors charged Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and other senior Hamas officials with planning and carrying out years of terrorist attacks in Israel, including the Oct. 7 massacre. The campaign to administer polio vaccines to children in Gaza is going well, officials say. Israel and Hamas have adhered to a pause in fighting to allow the drive to succeed. More International News U.S. and Iraqi commandos killed at least 14 Islamic State fighters in Iraq last week, a sign of the terrorist group’s resurgence. Seven American troops were wounded. At least 129 people died during an attempted jailbreak at the largest prison in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A boat carrying migrants capsized as it tried to cross the English Channel from France to Britain. At least 12 people died. An Olympic runner from Uganda was set on fire by her boyfriend, The Guardian reports. Starlink, the satellite-internet service controlled by Elon Musk, reversed course and said it would comply with Brazilian government orders to block X in the country. Other Big Stories A stock market tumble that began in the U.S. continued across Asia and Europe. The sell-off predominantly affected technology and semiconductor stocks. “This was a random act of violence”: A 30-year-old man in Chicago was charged with murder in the deaths of four passengers who were shot as they slept on a train. An 11-year-old is facing murder charges after he confessed to shooting an 82-year-old relative, once a mayor of a small Louisiana city, and the man’s adult daughter. Opinions How many women are in prison for killing their abusers? Rachel Louise Snyder writes about an effort to find out. Tech companies have long fought for our attention. They’re going further by building chatbots that can simulate relationships, Yuval Noah Harari writes. Here are columns by Thomas Friedman and Bret Stephens on Benjamin Netanyahu. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Arrangements of dyed chrysanthemums. Photograph by Florent Tanet. Set design by Nicholas William White Floral glow-up: The chrysanthemum, a staple of grocery store bouquets, is back in high fashion. Quiz: Do you have healthy brain habits? Answer these 12 questions. Work Friend: “Help! I’m ‘older’ and on the job hunt.” Health: Sitting all day can cause dead butt syndrome. The name might sound silly, but the condition can lead to chronic pain. Sunken treasure: New photos from the Titanic wreck show a long-lost statue. Lives Lived: James Darren played Moondoggie, a California surfer, in the hit 1959 movie “Gidget.” He went on to reprise the role, appear in the 1961 World War II drama “The Guns of Navarone” and have a long career in both prime-time television and music. He died at 88. SPORTS U.S. Open: The American players Frances Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz will face each other in the men’s singles semifinals. No American man has won the tournament since Andy Roddick in 2003. N.H.L.: The Edmonton Oilers signed superstar Leon Draisaitl to an eight-year contract extension worth $112 million, making the 28-year-old the highest-paid player in hockey. W.N.B.A.: Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever clinched a playoff spot last night, the franchise’s first postseason appearance in seven years. ARTS AND IDEAS Camille Brown leading a routine. Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times Ayodele Casel, LaTasha Barnes and Camille Brown are at the cutting edge of contemporary dance. In motion, though, they evoke figures from the Harlem Renaissance a century ago. See videos of the three women who are celebrating — and remixing — Black dance. More on culture Meet the songwriter behind Sabrina Carpenter’s hits (and more songs from pop’s next generation). Jack Robbins — son of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon — pokes fun at himself, and his fellow nepo babies, in a series of comedy videos. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Julia Gartland for The New York Times Grill eggplant with lentils and tahini. Pack away your summer clothes. Commute safely with a bike light. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was vibrant. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
Members phkrause Posted September 6, 2024 Author Members Posted September 6, 2024 September 5, 2024 Good morning. Today, my colleague Nick Corasaniti explains the preparations for a potential post-election legal fight. We’re also covering a school shooting in Georgia, a rape trial in France and robot taxis. —David Leonhardt Vote counting in Atlanta in 2020. Brynn Anderson/Associated Press The other battle By Nick Corasaniti I’ve been reporting on efforts to undermine the election. There are some big clashes coming in November, both before and after Election Day. Donald Trump and his allies have spent years sowing doubts about the integrity of American elections. They’ve falsely claimed, including through lawsuits, that voter rolls are full of ineligible voters and that mail ballots are often improperly counted. They’ve installed sympathetic officials at the state and local level who are ready to act on these accusations. They have hundreds of lawyers on standby. At the same time, Democrats and voting rights organizations are preparing to counter such efforts. They’ve revamped a nationwide voter protection team and built a legal army of their own. Polls suggest the presidential contest will be close. In every state where the margin is small, both sides expect a post-election battle over the outcome. (Since 2020, local officials in eight states have refused to certify various results.) The maelstrom could endanger the swift outcome that many voters expect. I’ve spent years reporting on the gathering storm. In today’s newsletter, I’ll describe what it could look like. The challenges American elections don’t all look the same. Each state runs its own election, meaning that each state will likely face its own unique set of legal challenges in November. Mail ballots have emerged as targets in Pennsylvania and Nevada. The manual that governs elections in Arizona faces multiple lawsuits. Republicans say the voter rolls in several states, including Michigan, are improperly maintained. Controversies could arise in any of those places. But the likeliest source of trouble at the moment is Georgia, which embodies Republicans’ two-pronged approach: They’ve set up new hurdles to voting and a process to stall — or even outright avoid — certifying the results if Trump loses. (In certification, local election officials are like scorekeepers at a football game, tallying up the points from each quarter to make a final, official score.) Georgia Republicans passed a host of new election laws beginning in 2021. One changed the makeup of the State Election Board, taking power from the secretary of state — Brad Raffensperger, who declined to help Trump overturn the last election. Lawmakers can now appoint a majority of members. (I’ll return to this in a minute.) Another law expanded the ability for citizens to challenge a voter’s eligibility. Right-wing activist networks in states beyond Georgia, such as Michigan and Nevada, have been filing tens of thousands of citizen-led mass challenges. The new laws could fuel a post-election dispute. Trump’s allies might claim, for instance, that unresolved challenges or improperly maintained voter rolls are evidence of illegal votes. Courts, secretaries of state and law enforcement have traditionally solved those issues, because local officials are not referees; in nearly every state, they must sign off on elections by a specific deadline. But this year, right-wing activists hope to assert greater control over certification, allowing them to hunt for fraud or delay the result. Electronic voting booths. Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock In 2024 alone, local election officials in Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania have refused to certify primary elections, though they’ve never overturned results. In Georgia, a crucial swing state, the State Election Board could equip county board members to do the same. Using their new 3-2 majority there, Republican appointees ruled that officials could conduct “reasonable inquiry” into elections before certifying the results. Democrats worry they will use this new power to point to any irregularities and defend a refusal to certify. Trump said the new Election Board members were “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.” In a worst-case scenario, officials in any of these states could blow past the Dec. 11 deadline to submit their final certified results, throwing the election into a legal gray area. That could give their allies in Congress political cover to reject slates of electors and overturn the election result. The counteroffensive In previous cycles, Democrats had an expansive team of lawyers and volunteers on what’s known as a “voter protection” unit. This year, they’ve moved those people inside the legal apparatus of Kamala Harris’s campaign. They’ve also hired dozens of lawyers in battleground states. At the same time, the Republican National Committee has a legal team of hundreds. They work with local lawyers in key swing states. Allied outside groups are also joining the battle. The sides have already tussled in dozens of lawsuits this year, arguing over mail ballots and voter rolls. But they’ve also zeroed in on certification in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Democrats have asked courts to require local officials to certify elections. Trump allies want those officials to have discretion over whether to certify. Two lawsuits in Georgia are testing these ideas. In other states, such as Arizona, courts have agreed with Democrats that both local and state officials must certify the vote by established deadlines. Even as some voters will begin to receive absentee ballots starting tomorrow, much of the legal picture remains unsettled. New lawsuits are filed regularly, and nearly every court decision is immediately appealed. An informal judicial doctrine, known as the Purcell principle, urges judges not to change rules close to an election, but it is not binding. Just last week, a Pennsylvania court ruled that misdated mail ballots could be counted. By Monday, Republicans had already filed an appeal. More on the election Trump has reached an uneasy truce with Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Republican governor, who refused to help him overturn the 2020 election there. Liz Cheney, a former House Republican, said she would vote for Harris, citing “the danger that Donald Trump poses.” Harris, while campaigning in New Hampshire, signaled that she’d be more business-friendly than President Biden and proposed expanding a tax break for start-up companies. A top House Republican issued a subpoena to Tim Walz for details about a pandemic-era fraud scheme in which a nonprofit in Minnesota stole $250 million. Harris’s campaign agreed to have the candidates’ microphones muted when they aren’t speaking during next week’s debate with Trump. On Fox News, Trump suggested the debate would be biased against him. Iran is spreading disinformation about both candidates, hoping to discredit U.S. democracy, but Tehran seems focused on hurting Trump more than Harris. The Justice Department accused two employees of RT, a Russian broadcaster, of paying a Tennessee-based company $10 million to spread propaganda videos. There’s no evidence that many noncitizens vote. Republicans are planning a crackdown anyway. THE LATEST NEWS Georgia School Shooting In Winder, Ga. Christian Monterrosa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Two students and two teachers were killed in a shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., about an hour outside Atlanta. Nine others were wounded. The shooter, whom the authorities identified as a 14-year-old student, surrendered to law enforcement and will be charged as an adult. Local police had questioned him last year over online threats about a school shooting. The authorities identified the students killed as Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and the educators killed as Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie. (Spellings of the names were not confirmed by the authorities.) Harris called it “a senseless tragedy,” adding that gun violence was “one of the many issues that’s at stake in this election.” Trump expressed condolences for the victims and called the shooter “a sick and deranged monster” on social media. Politics Along the U.S.-Mexico border. Paul Ratje for The New York Times Biden may try to make his recent asylum restrictions — which have sharply reduced border crossings — a lasting part of the immigration system. Shares of Trump’s social media company have fallen sharply since it merged with a shell company in March. Trump’s stake, once worth $6 billion, has lost two-thirds of its value. Biden is expected to block Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, from buying U.S. Steel. Supporters of the move oppose foreign ownership for a major domestic steel producer; critics note that Japan is an American ally crucial to the effort to check China’s power. The U.S. Space Force — a military branch established by Trump — is quietly preparing for a new era of warfare as China and Russia build arsenals that could target American satellites, The Wall Street Journal reports. Middle East In rural Afghanistan. Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times The Taliban, three years into their rule in Afghanistan, have restricted women’s rights by law, including a ban on their voices in public. A U.N. team has spent years in Iraq documenting the ISIS genocide against the Yazidi people. The Iraqi government has ordered the investigators to leave with many sites still unexamined. International mediators are finalizing a new proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza. Both Israel and Hamas have expressed pessimism over the chances of an agreement. More International News Unusually heavy rains have hit Pakistan this monsoon season. Many who are still recovering from devastating floods in 2022 are bracing to lose everything they rebuilt. In France, 51 men are on trial after a man was accused of drugging his wife and then inviting dozens of men to rape her over almost a decade. The victim chose to make the trial public. China is hosting a three-day gathering of leaders from more than 50 African countries, an event meant to demonstrate the influence of Xi Jinping. Rebecca Cheptegei, a Ugandan long-distance runner who competed at the Paris Olympics, died days after she was set on fire by a man with whom she was in a relationship. Twenty-one migrants are missing at sea after a boat from Libya capsized 10 miles from the Italian coast, according to rescued survivors. Other Big Stories In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Paul Ratje for The New York Times American citizens whose spouses have been deported face wrenching decisions about what is best for their future. Jury selection is set to begin today in Hunter Biden’s trial on tax charges in Los Angeles. Opinions Mexico’s president wants judges to be elected by popular vote. That could give political donors influence over rulings, Amrit Singh and Adriana Garcia write. Here are columns by Thomas Edsall on polarization, and Pamela Paul on subway safety. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS A driverless cab. Jason Henry for The New York Times Technology: A self-driving car company owned by Amazon is deploying robot taxis without steering wheels. The vehicles still need help from humans hundreds of miles away. South Africa: A beauty pageant contestant’s Nigerian heritage set off a national debate about nationality and, ultimately, xenophobia. Ask Well: “Can I lower my cholesterol without taking a statin?” Lives Lived: Jim Riswold’s ads for Nike — including a series starring Michael Jordan and Spike Lee — redrew the playing field for product endorsements and propelled athletic footwear into the cultural stratosphere. Riswold died at 66. SPORTS Tennis: Jessica Pegula is through to the semifinals at the U.S. Open after defeating the No. 1 seed, Iga Swiatek. N.F.L.: The season officially kicks off tonight as the Baltimore Ravens visit the Kansas City Chiefs. Read about Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson. W.N.B.A.: Caitlin Clark became the fastest player in league history to reach 100 3-pointers in a season. Our columnist argues she should share the Rookie of the Year award with Angel Reese. ARTS AND IDEAS Recently surfaced footage of John F. Kennedy being rushed to the hospital. via RR Auction Nearly 61 years ago, Dale Carpenter Sr., a businessman, captured a chaotic scene in Dallas in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination: the president’s convertible speeding on the highway toward Parkland Hospital, a Secret Service agent sprawled on the back. Carpenter’s video, which is just over a minute long and has only been seen by a few people, will be auctioned this month. It’s estimated to be worth more than $100,000. More on culture It’s fashion month. As it starts, Vanessa Friedman explains what you need to know. Jimmy Kimmel mocked Trump for flubbing words before doing so himself. “That’s why I’m not going to be president,” he said. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Mark Weinberg for The New York Times Combine two popular desserts with chewy brownie cookies. Use these cheap laundry aids. Clean a stroller. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was polygamy. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Quote phkrause Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
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