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March 9, 2023

 

Good morning. Both U.S. political parties are now open to the idea that Covid may have come from a lab in China.

 
 
 
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Witnesses at yesterday’s hearing about the pandemic.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

An animal or a lab?

A new House committee investigating the origins of Covid opened its first public hearing yesterday with plenty of political theater. Republicans accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of covering up the virus’s origins, and Democrats criticized those claims as biased and unsubstantiated. But lawmakers displayed bipartisan agreement on one point: The virus really may have come from a laboratory in China.

“Whether it was a lab leak or infection through animals, I think we’ve got to pursue both of those paths if we are ever to get the truth,” Representative Kweisi Mfume, Democrat of Maryland, said.

Such agreement might have been surprising not long ago. From the start of the pandemic, the idea of a lab leak was fraught. Some scientists treated it as an outright conspiracy theory. Many Democratic politicians, journalists and others instead embraced the explanation that the virus jumped from animals to humans.

Now, the F.B.I. and the Energy Department, which employ leading U.S. scientists, say a lab is the likely origin. But they remain uncertain, and four other U.S. intelligence agencies say, with low confidence, that it more likely originated in animals.

Today’s newsletter will explain the debate over the theory and why it matters.

What’s the lab leak theory?

There are actually multiple lab leak theories.

The most plausible is that the virus accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, where scientists may have been studying it, and possibly engineered it, for research and medical purposes.

That theory differs from the claim that lab scientists created Covid as a bioweapon or that China intentionally leaked the virus. Neither experts nor U.S. officials take that assertion seriously. “It is an important distinction,” said my colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who covers health policy.

What is the case for each explanation?

The natural origin theory: Animal-to-human transmission is the predominant origin of viral diseases, including other coronaviruses and bird flus. Many of the first confirmed Covid cases were linked to an animal market in Wuhan, and live mammals there are known to spread viruses.

The lab leak theory: Wuhan is home to an advanced virus-research lab and the Chinese C.D.C. — ties that lend credence to the idea of a lab leak, much as the animal market’s presence does for the natural origin theory. Chinese officials’ apparent destruction of evidence adds to the suspicions of a lab leak. Biological labs around the world also have a history of accidental leaks.

Even many officials and others who lean toward one of the two theories remain uncertain. U.S. officials are divided and acknowledge they are working with imperfect information, largely because China has not allowed an independent investigation within its borders.

Why does this debate matter?

For many, determining the cause of a pandemic that has killed nearly seven million people worldwide, including 1.1 million in the U.S., is important regardless of broader implications. Basically, the truth matters for its own sake.

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The Wuhan Institute of Virology.Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Learning the origins of Covid could help save lives, too. If the virus came from an animal, then studying and tracking the spread of viruses in nature could be crucial to preventing the next pandemic. If it originated in a lab, then improving the security and safety of virology labs might be more important.

And if both theories seem plausible, that is a case for doing more to prevent animal-to-human transmission and future lab leaks. “Some scientists argue there’s more to be done on both fronts,” said my colleague Benjamin Mueller, who covers health and science.

Why the lab leak skepticism?

Some scientists who initially dismissed the lab leak based their views on earlier, incomplete evidence. At first, experts embraced the animal market explanation because some of the first confirmed cases, from December 2019, were linked to the market. But researchers later discovered that the virus may have been spreading weeks earlier, and it is not clear that those cases were linked to the market.

Typical human bias probably played a role in the skepticism, too. “Scientists are human, and science has become a vested-interest industry,” Tim Trevan, founder of the safety consulting company Chrome Biorisk Management, wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Early in the pandemic, the lab leak theory became politicized when Donald Trump and his allies began promoting it. Many experts took sides, as did much of the public. Some may have also feared that blaming scientists for Covid could have vilified their industry and hurt the funding they rely on. The dynamic is a reminder that experts are also susceptible to biases and self-interest like the rest of us.

Will we ever know the origin?

Probably not. Pinning down the origin of a virus is inherently difficult. China has made the task harder, blocking outside investigations and refusing to share data on the virus’s spread.

But the investigations, including the House’s, have already spurred discussion and debate about better tracking of animal viruses and improving lab security. Those steps could help save lives even if we never know what really caused the Covid pandemic.

For more: “Assigning blame is not going to bring back seven million people” The hearing showed the difficulty of uncovering conclusive evidence about Covid’s origin.

 

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics
 
International
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An armed guard in Dhangri village.Atul Loke for The New York Times
  • India is arming villagers in part of Kashmir, one of the world’s most militarized places, after attacks against Hindus.
  • Russia launched missiles at residential areas in Ukraine this morning, killing at least nine people.
  • After street protests, Georgian lawmakers dropped a law that critics said was inspired by Russia and would have been used to clamp down on dissent.
 
Other Big Stories
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A memorial to Breonna Taylor, whom the police shot to death in 2020.Xavier Burrell for The New York Times
 
Opinions

English majors are disappearing, partly because of the miserable way K-12 schools teach it, Pamela Paul writes.

The Supreme Court isn’t just scrutinizing Biden’s student debt program. It’s also confronting the ways presidents have abused emergency powers since Sept. 11, says Christopher Caldwell.

Jennifer Finney Boylan was a Rockefeller Republican at the start of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. His triumphs — and failures — turned her into a progressive, she writes.

 
 

The All Access sale. For a limited time.

Readers of The Morning can enjoy everything The Times has to offer, all in one subscription and all for a special rate. Subscribe today for unlimited access to News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic.

 

MORNING READS

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Kate Dehler

Cluttercore: Your bedroom isn’t messy — it’s trendy.

High-altitude treks: Nepal will ban solo hikers in its national parks.

Restaurant review: Soupless ramen in a stressless setting.

A morning listen: Imagining life with the men of their dreams.

Advice from Wirecutter: How to clean your Birkenstocks.

Lives Lived: Topol, an Israeli actor, took on the role of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” in his late 20s and reprised the role for decades. He died at 87.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

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Jim BoeheimChris Carlson/Associated Press

A titan: Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim said he would retire after 47 seasons coaching the Orange. He leaves with the second-most wins in N.C.A.A. history.

NDA challenge: Erica Herman, Tiger Woods’s former girlfriend, asked a court to release her from a nondisclosure agreement that she says Woods made her sign in 2017.

Staying a Yankee: The story of how Aaron Judge turned down more than $40 million extra from the San Diego Padres.

 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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To glove or not to glove?Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images

The cotton menace

Picture a museum worker holding up a centuries-old book. Is the person wearing white gloves? “The glove thing,” one museum director said, wearily, to The Times’s Jennifer Schuessler. “It just won’t die.”

People who work with rare books say the conventional wisdom is wrong: Delicate manuscripts should not be handled with gloves — which make fingers clumsy and actually attract dirt — but with clean, bare hands. Barbara Heritage, a curator at the University of Virginia, acknowledged it could be “shocking” to see precious books handled with bare hands. “But that’s how these books were read, and how they were made,” she said.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Linda Xiao for The New York Times

Steam, roast or pan-grill this salmon in aluminum foil.

 
What to Read

Patricia Highsmith was excellent at creating psychopathic antiheroes. Browse a guide to her best books.

 
The Oscars

Watch scenes from eight of the Best Picture nominees, narrated by their directors.

 
Late Night

The hosts can’t believe Tucker Carlson’s texts about Trump.

 
Now Time to Play
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was embankment. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Let the spirit move you? (three letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. “A pro in every aspect of crossword making”: Lynn Lempel published her 100th puzzle in The Times this week.

The Daily” is about migrant children.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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Good morning. Is the Democratic Party again starting to pay more attention to labor unions?

 
 
 
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A U.A.W. worker at a meeting of the labor committee of the Michigan House of Representatives this week.Emily Elconin for The New York Times

A battle unjoined

For decades, the Republican Party has seemed to care more about labor unions than the Democratic Party has.

Many Republican officials treat organized labor as their political enemy. When Republicans gain power in a state capital, they often try to pass “right to work” laws meant to shrink unions. And these laws have their intended effect: They reduce the number of workers who belong to unions, reduce Democrats’ share of the vote in elections and reduce the number of working-class candidates who run for office, academic research has found.

Modern Democratic politicians, on the other hand, have often sat out the political battle. Every Democratic president for decades, including Joe Biden, has said he favors a federal law to make it easier for workers to organize — and each of those presidents has failed to pass such a law. Democratic leaders in Congress also have not made labor law a priority. Nor have many Democratic governors.

Jamelle Bouie, a Times Opinion columnist, captured this asymmetry when he wrote: “Republicans and other conservatives know who their enemies are — they know that organized labor is a key obstacle to dismantling the social safety net. The question is whether Democrats understand that their fortunes are also bound up in the fate of workers.”

But events in Michigan this week raise the question of whether Democrats are starting to change their approach and devote more attention to strengthening organized labor.

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The labor committee of the Michigan House.Emily Elconin for The New York Times

Why Michigan matters

On Wednesday, Democrats in the Michigan House of Representatives passed a bill repealing the right-to-work law that Republicans enacted in 2012. For the new bill to become law, the State Senate, which Democrats also control, would need to pass it and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would need to sign it, as she has signaled she will. Democrats gained control of the Michigan House and Senate in last year’s elections.

If the bill did become law, it would be one of only a handful of repeals of any statewide right-to-work laws. “It’s a huge deal,” Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington who has studied the issue, told me.

Currently, 27 states have such laws, including most of the South and the Great Plains, as well as Indiana and Wisconsin. Whenever Republicans control both the legislature and governorship in a state, they typically push for a right-to-work law. Yet when Democrats have taken control of a state government, they have sometimes left the law in place, as was the case in Virginia a few years ago, Grumbach noted.

The details of the right-to-work debate can be technical, but they’re worth taking a minute to understand. Above all, the laws mandate that nonunionized workers cannot be required to pay the equivalent of union dues, even if the union is negotiating pay and benefits on the workers’ behalf. Many contracts call for a company’s management and union to agree on pay and benefits for all workers in a given job category, regardless of their union status.

The central argument in favor of the laws is based on individual freedom: Why should workers have to pay dues to a union to which they don’t belong? The very term “right to work,” coined by a Dallas Morning News editorial writer in 1941, evokes freedom. The central argument against the laws is grounded in economics: They allow nonunionized workers to become free riders, receiving the advantages of collective bargaining without paying for it.

A 20 percent raise

Wherever you fall on this debate, the laws clearly have an impact. They lead union membership to decline, as more workers choose not to pay dues and instead take home more money in the short term. Eventually, the laws do enough to weaken unions that they disappear from some workplaces.

In the long term, the decline of unions tends to hurt workers: A large recent study, consistent with other research, found that union members made about 20 percent more on average than nonunionized workers who were otherwise similar. The additional wages often came out of corporate profits, which explains why the decline of unions has contributed to rising economic inequality. The shrinking of unions effectively redistributes income from low- and middle-income workers to affluent investors.

(In a new Times Magazine essay about American poverty, the sociologist Matthew Desmond writes: “With unions largely out of the picture, corporations have chipped away at the conventional midcentury work arrangement, which involved steady employment, opportunities for advancement and raises and decent pay with some benefits.”)

Then there are the political effects of unions. They help turn out voters and focus voters on economic issues. That focusing role is significant because of a fact that I’ve often covered in this newsletter: Many working-class Americans hold progressive economic views while also being religious, patriotic and socially moderate.

When a labor union talks to these voters about economic policy, they become more likely to vote for a Democrat. When they are not in a union, they may instead be swayed to vote Republican by their evangelical church or Fox News. A 2018 academic study, comparing counties on either side of a state border, found that the passage of a right-to-work law reduced the Democratic Party’s vote share by about three percentage points on average.

The bottom line

The repeal of Michigan’s right-to-work law would be significant on its own, given the size of the state’s economy and its importance in presidential elections. It would also highlight a larger trend: The Democratic Party again seems to be emphasizing organized labor, as it did in the mid-20th century.

Biden may have failed to pass a federal law making it easier for workers to join unions, but he has repeatedly talked about their importance and included pro-union provisions in other bills. “He is paying more authentic attention to the needs of working people to have unions than the last three Democratic presidents have,” Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., told me.

What’s next in Michigan: The state senate seems likely to vote on the bill next week.

 

THE LATEST NEWS

The Budget
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President Biden in Philadelphia yesterday.Doug Mills/The New York Times
  • Biden released his proposed budget. It would reduce the deficit through a minimum tax on billionaires and a higher tax on corporate stock buybacks.
  • The budget won’t become law but offers a preview of the populist themes Biden will probably highlight in a re-election campaign.
  • Congressional Republicans called Biden’s plan “a road map for fiscal ruin.” Republicans have not yet released their own budget plan.
 
Politics
 
War in Ukraine
 
Other Big Stories
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Greg Mascher, an East Palestine resident, with his granddaughter.Brian Kaiser for The New York Times
 
Opinions

Why are conservatives obsessing about wokeness? With economic conservatism in shambles and Roe v. Wade gone, they’re flailing about for a cause, Michelle Goldberg says.

Many American men are falling behind in education, employment and health, Richard Reeves argues on “The Ezra Klein Show.”

 
 

Save on all of The Times. For a limited time.

Readers of The Morning can gain unlimited access to News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, all in one subscription. Subscribe today during the All Access sale and enjoy a special offer.

 

MORNING READS

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Ravenna High School’s band.Ashley Markle for The New York Times

Coming of age: In a small Ohio town, the band room is an escape.

“Gymtimidation” is real: Don’t let that stop you from working out.

Lab studies: Female mice have been left out of research because of their hormones. Male mice are more erratic.

One more St. Patrick’s Day: Malachy McCourt, a 91-year-old actor, writer and bartender, still has a few stories left.

Advice from Wirecutter: Pick the best disposable camera.

Lives Lived: Ian Falconer designed opera sets, drew covers for The New Yorker and created “Olivia,” a children’s book about a piglet that became a sensation. Falconer died at 63.

Robert Blake portrayed gritty characters, but a trial and acquittal in his wife’s murder eclipsed his acting career. Blake died at 89.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

Accusations of hazing: Former women’s ice hockey players at Harvard say the program crossed the boundaries of acceptable treatment of athletes.

The firing of a basketball legend: Patrick Ewing is out as Georgetown’s head coach. A possible replacement: Rick Pitino.

Heels out: North Carolina fell to Virginia in the A.C.C. conference tournament yesterday, all but sealing its exclusion from the N.C.A.A. tournament this year.

 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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Ostrich feathers on a coat at Valentino.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times

Fashion takes flight

The winter fashion season wrapped up this week, and if there was a central trend among the shows in Paris, it was feathers, The Times’s Elizabeth Paton writes: layered goose plumes on tops and pants, a large ostrich feather rippling out from pantsuits and more. “In our world of oppression, pressure and anxiety, we need freedom, lightness and the ability to fly,” the founder of a Ukrainian fashion label said.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Craig Lee for The New York Times

Cocoa powder gives these cupcakes a deep chocolaty flavor.

 
What to Watch

“Scream VI” is a grimier entry in the franchise, with some frightening suspense scenes.

 
Travel

Things to do for 36 hours in Nashville.

 
Late Night

The hosts discussed Trump’s new book, priced at $99.

 
News Quiz

How well did you follow the headlines this week?

 
Now Time to Play
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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was unequaled. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: British Z’s (four letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. “Sin Eater: The Crimes of Anthony Pellicano,” a Times documentary about a Hollywood fixer, premieres tonight. Watch the trailer.

The Daily” is about Israel.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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Share on other sites

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March 11, 2023

 

Good morning. Get your popcorn. Manage your expectations. The 95th Academy Awards are tomorrow.

 
 
 
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María Jesús Contreras

Screen time

The Oscars are tomorrow night. Have you filled out your ballot? Me neither, but that’s because I am still optimistic I’ll squeeze in a few more viewings of nominated films before the red carpet begins. (That’s at 6:30 p.m. Eastern; the ceremony starts at 8. The Times’s live coverage starts in the afternoon. Don’t forget to turn your clocks forward tonight!)

I admitted to some colleagues the other day that I’d yet to see “Top Gun: Maverick,” and they reacted as though I’d insulted them, insisting I had to see it immediately, and on the big screen. In this strange cinema-optional universe we’re inhabiting now, it’s so tempting to default to streaming.

When I think back on my favorite movies of the year, the ones I saw in the theater did leave the biggest mark. I’m grateful for the afternoon I saw “Everything Everywhere All at Once” in an empty theater in Downtown Brooklyn, sitting through the credits as the lights came up. And for the full house at “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a film so emotionally devastating that the crowd felt like a support system.

Tomorrow, I’ll watch the Oscars from my living room, on the small screen, the way they were intended. I’ll be half on my phone, texting and reading Twitter, half watching the spectacle before me. It’s easy to be cynical about “Hollywood’s biggest night,” when the film industry awards its own for doing their jobs, but the ridiculousness of it is part of the fun.

I’ll be watching the best actress category with the most anticipation. Will it be Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere”? Cate Blanchett in “Tár”? Blanchett has won twice before, for “Blue Jasmine” and “The Aviator.” This is Yeoh’s first nomination, and she would be the first Asian woman to win in this category. Their competition includes Andrea Riseborough, the star of “To Leslie,” an under-the-radar contender whose grass-roots social-media campaign for the nomination was the subject of an academy investigation.

The supporting actor and actress categories are full of nostalgic favorites. Ke Huy Quan, nominated for “Everything Everywhere,” recently returned to acting decades after starring in “The Goonies” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” as a child. (Film buffs will recall he was in “Encino Man” in 1992 with Brendan Fraser, a nominee for best actor.) Judd Hirsch (“The Fabelmans”) is also in the running. He was nominated in 1981 for “Ordinary People.” Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and Jamie Lee Curtis (“Everything Everywhere”) are both nominated for best supporting actress. Bassett was nominated for “What’s Love Got to Do With It” in 1994. This is Curtis’s first nomination.

On the heels of her Super Bowl halftime show performance, Rihanna is slated to sing her nominated song, “Lift Me Up,” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” David Byrne will perform “This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere” with Son Lux and Stephanie Hsu, a nominee for best supporting actress. I will remind anyone who loves Son Lux’s score from “Everything Everywhere” that the theme song to the NXIVM documentary series “The Vow” is a version of their song “Dream State” and it’s very good.

Will Fraser win for “The Whale”? Will the ceremony include drama on the order of last year’s slap? Will Austin Butler speak in his Elvis voice? Will viewership of the show remain low? Could “All Quiet on the Western Front” win best picture? We’ll have to stay up until the bitter end to find out. See you on the couch.

For more

 

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THE WEEK IN CULTURE

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Miu Miu’s fall 2023 show.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times
 

THE LATEST NEWS

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A worker tells people that the Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., is closed.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
 
 

Save on all of The Times. For a limited time.

Readers of The Morning can gain unlimited access to News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, all in one subscription. Subscribe today during the All Access sale and enjoy a special offer.

 

CULTURE CALENDAR

📚 “The Candy House” (out in paperback): Jennifer Egan’s sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad” was one of The Times’s 10 best books of 2022. Through a series of related characters — each gets a chapter — it tells the story of a future technology that allows human memories to be uploaded to the cloud and experienced by all. Sometimes, wrote our critic Dwight Garner, “you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle.”

📺 “Ted Lasso” (Wednesday): Given the amount of time it feels like we’ve been talking about this Apple TV+ series, one of TV’s most beloved comedies, it’s a bit surprising that it’s only starting its third season. But break out your Jason Sudeikis ’staches for the return of the ever-beleaguered AFC Richmond.

 

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RECIPE OF THE WEEK

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Craig Lee for The New York Times

Roasted Cod and Potatoes

Everyone should have a few three-ingredient recipes in their back pocket, and Mark Bittman’s roasted cod and potatoes is one of mine. In it, thinly sliced potatoes are tossed with olive oil or butter, then baked until soft. Cod fillets are perched on top (though you can use any kind of fish), then the whole thing is broiled until the potatoes singe at the edges and the fish cooks through. It’s simplicity at its best, easy to throw together but flavorful, and can be dressed up in innumerable ways. Add dollops of salted yogurt for creaminess, a squeeze of lemon or lime juice for tang, or chile crisp or flakes for heat. Or add all of the above for a deeply complex, satisfying dish that’s still an utter snap to make.

A selection of New York Times recipes is available to all readers. Please consider a Cooking subscription for full access.

 

REAL ESTATE

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Diana Paulson/Linea Photo

What you get for $1.4 million: A modernist kit house in Lake Leelanau, Mich.; a Mediterranean-style home in Providence, R.I.; or a Craftsman bungalow in Portland, Ore.

“Excuse after excuse": Black and Latino developers often struggle to get loans.

Sagging floors, leaking roof: One couple gutted a home in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., to start over.

E-bikes and scooters: They keep causing fatal fires in buildings.

The hunt: One couple had $650,000 to spend in San Diego. Which home did they choose? Play our game.

 

LIVING

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Stefano Ortega for The New York Times

Just breathe: Three exercises to relieve stress and improve health.

Opt out: Keep your Instagram posts from showing up on Facebook.

Dinner, drinks, dancing: Where to celebrate your birthday in your 30s.

Tiny love story: She kept saying yes, even after a cancer diagnosis.

Travel awareness: Heading to Mexico? Here are tips to stay safe.

 

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Clean your air fryer

We’d like to think air fryers can take the chore out of cooking and add some charm. And though they cut cook times in half and leave fewer dirty dishes, cleaning them can be pesky. Wirecutter’s editors rolled up their sleeves to identify the best way to clean air fryers. The good news: It takes only 10 minutes. The bad: You should clean yours after every use. — Caira Blackwell

 

GAME OF THE WEEKEND

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Knicks guard Jalen Brunson, right, and the Lakers’ Dennis Schroder.Brad Penner/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

New York Knicks vs. Los Angeles Lakers: This is not where either team expected to be three-quarters through the N.B.A. season. The Knicks are red hot: They have won eight of their past 10 and are set to cruise into the playoffs, thanks in large part to Jalen Brunson, their new do-it-all point guard who is having the best season of his career. The Lakers, on the other hand, have struggled all year. And with LeBron James out with a foot injury, there’s a chance they might miss the playoffs — something James’s teams rarely do. 9 p.m. Eastern tomorrow on ESPN.

For more

 

NOW TIME TO PLAY

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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was applicant. Here is today’s puzzle.

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

Here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 12, 2023

 

Good morning. Bring these books to the park on your first warm day of spring.

 
 
 
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Reading in Central Park.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

An accomplice

The first day of spring is technically a date on the calendar. But your first day of spring is subjective.

It might be the first time you realize you’re sweating in long sleeves, or step out of your office into warmer air, or eat dinner while it’s miraculously, implausibly still light out.

On my first day of spring, I reach for a book to join me on a triumphant trip outside, my accomplice in an annual coup against winter.

The next equinox is approaching, but I am still waiting for the sun. (It’s snowing where I am as I write this.) In hopeful anticipation, I asked editors from The Times’s Books section what they’d pick from their spring fiction and nonfiction lists for their first nice day outside.

“Pineapple Street”

By Jenny Jackson

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A table setting designed with military precision.Bianca Bagnarelli

On the first semi-warm Saturday of spring, once you’ve located a pair of sunglasses and checked the expiration date on your sunscreen, may I recommend heading to the park with “Pineapple Street” by Jenny Jackson?

The characters you’ll be reading about would prefer the combination of a striped cabana chair and an elegant picnic, but any old bench and an apple will do. Prepare to lose an afternoon to the season’s first beach read, a delicious romp of a debut featuring family crises galore. The headline on our review (“Big Money, Big Houses and Big Problems in Brooklyn Heights”) pretty much says it all. — Elisabeth Egan, preview editor

“Birnam Wood”

By Eleanor Catton

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I’ve been burned by the spring idiom “in like a lion, out like a lamb,” enough times that I’m always skeptical that fairer weather is here to stay. But once the sun starts peeking out, I can’t think of a better spring companion than “Birnam Wood,” Eleanor Catton’s new ecological thriller.

It follows a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand that tangles with an American billionaire: Both have their sights on an abandoned plot of farmland that’s been isolated after a landslide, though they have very different goals in mind. It’s absorbing enough that I could sit though a rain shower, a cold snap or even a heat wave and not miss a page. — Joumana Khatib, senior staff editor

“Monsters”

By Claire Dederer

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If you’re like me, as spring arrives and the earth warms up, so does your appetite for culture. But these days the impulse to, say, binge-watch Woody Allen movies or indulge an obsession with “Rosemary’s Baby” can feel particularly fraught — part of the roiling debate over what to do about art you love made by people who may have done bad things.

That’s why I’m looking forward to “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” by Claire Dederer. Instead of trying to resolve the issue, Dederer dissects it from every possible angle, suggesting, with her signature smarts and self-deprecating wit, that we cannot consider what’s monstrous in the artist unless we reckon simultaneously with what’s monstrous in ourselves. — Emily Eakin, preview editor

“Humanly Possible”

By Sarah Bakewell

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If you’ve read Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café” (2016) — a delicious account of the beginnings of the movement and its early philosophers — you’ll understand why I ordered a copy of her next book as soon as I could.

“Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope” bites off a lot, no question, with subjects as varied as Boccaccio, Frederick Douglass and Bertrand Russell. At times the project of cataloging, or indeed defining, the threads of centuries of free thinking can verge on overly ambitious. Yet Bakewell is so deft, so engaging, and has such an eye for vivid detail that the process of reading it is, ultimately, a pleasure. — Sadie Stein, preview editor

More books news

 

NEWS

International
 
Politics
  • Ron DeSantis’s removal of an elected prosecutor in Florida was politicized, a Times investigation found.
  • The exposure of Fox News hosts’ private messages has embarrassed the network, but it could still win in court.
  • The Navy will rename two vessels as part of its effort to strip away Confederate ties.
 
Climate
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The Christmas Creek iron ore mine in Western Australia.Giacomo d’Orlando for The New York Times
  • Investors, including oil companies, are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to turn water into fuel.
  • The Biden administration is planning to greenlight an $8 billion oil drilling project in Alaska, in the largest single expanse of pristine U.S. wilderness.
 
Other Big Stories
 

FROM OPINION

Three years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, the world remains unprepared for the next one, Tom Inglesby argues.

Female political candidates win elections and raise money as well as male ones. But too few run, Jessica Grose writes.

Truly fixing Social Security and Medicare means balancing respect for the retiring generation with devotion to the rising one, says Yuval Levin.

 
 

The Sunday question: Do we still need the Oscars?

Beyond their many scandals, the awards rarely honor inventive movies and are often out of touch, Dana Stevens writes in The Atlantic. But this year’s nominees span genres, telling diverse stories that the public — not just critics — actually saw, says The Financial Times’s Danny Leigh.

 
 

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Readers of The Morning can gain unlimited access to News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, all in one subscription. Subscribe today during the All Access sale and enjoy a special offer.

 

MORNING READS

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The 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps in Yellowstone National Park in 1896.F. Jay Haynes. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

Remarkable feat: Black soldiers cycled nearly 2,000 miles across the country in the 19th century. Erick Cedeño retraced their journey.

Ted Lasso star: The actor who plays Roy will soon be a Marvel god.

March Madness: The odds of nailing your N.C.A.A. tournament predictions are roughly one in 9.2 quintillion.

Vows: They met on Instagram. Their TikTok account now has 1.3 million followers.

Sunday routine: A fashion editor eats an Ethiopian lunch.

Advice from Wirecutter: The best dish soap.

Lives lived: Bud Grant was a strait-laced Hall of Fame football coach who led the Minnesota Vikings for 18 years and took the team to four Super Bowls. He died at 95.

 

THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

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Illustration by Hokyoung Kim for The New York Times

On the cover: The astonishing reach of Chinese espionage.

Persistent poverty: Why can’t the U.S. lift up its poorest citizens?

Poem: Ryan Eckes writes “the day is long, the pain is old.”

Diagnosis: He had uncontrollable sweating. Was it male menopause?

 

THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For
  • The 95th Academy Awards are tonight, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” leads the nominations with 11.
  • President Biden will host Rishi Sunak and Anthony Albanese, the prime ministers of Britain and Australia, on Monday to discuss the three nations’ security pact, known as AUKUS.
  • New Consumer Price Index data will be released on Tuesday, assessing inflation.
  • President Biden will visit Monterey Park, Calif., on Tuesday to call for stronger gun control amid a rise in mass shootings in the U.S., including one in Monterey Park in January.
  • The first round of the men’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, also known as March Madness, begins on Thursday. The women’s tournament begins on Friday.
  • Friday is St. Patrick’s Day.
 
What to Cook This Week
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Bryan Gardner for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne

The recipes in Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter this week are aimed at making you a better cook. Glazed tofu with chile and star anise calls for searing a block of tofu then tearing it apart, to better soak up sauce. Ritzy Cheddar chicken breasts use crushed crackers for an amazing crunch. And for velvety scrambled eggs, J. Kenji López-Alt calls for poaching beaten eggs in cream — it’s not as fussy as it sounds.

 

NOW TIME TO PLAY

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The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were deathly and heatedly. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Small act of kindness (five letters).

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.

Here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 13, 2023

 

Good morning. Is the U.S. at risk of another financial panic? We’ll learn more today.

 
 
 
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Silicon Valley Bank.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Boom and bust, again

Today is a day of uncertainty for the American economy.

Will more banks have to close, as Silicon Valley Bank did last week and Signature Bank did yesterday? How will financial markets react? What will the federal government do? And will the current turmoil prove to be fleeting — or turn into a true crisis?

In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk through the basics of the potential financial panic sparked by the failure of SVB (as Silicon Valley Bank is known) and summarize the latest Times coverage.

What happened?

SVB, founded in California in 1983, became one of the country’s 20 largest banks mostly by lending money to start-ups. SVB was sometimes willing to back start-ups that more traditional banks were not — and some of those companies went on to great success.

SVB’s problems date to 2021, when many technology start-ups were flush with cash and deposited large amounts of it with the bank. SVB, in turn, tried to increase its profits by investing those deposits elsewhere. But as the Federal Reserve increased interest rates to fight inflation over the past two years, SVB’s investments began to lose value. (Kevin Roose’s column helpfully tells the longer version of the story.)

The bank’s clients became worried in recent days that it would no longer have enough money to repay its customers, and a classic bank run occurred. On Friday, federal regulators said they would take over SVB.

Bank runs are especially dangerous because they feed on themselves, sowing panic as people worry that their own deposits may be at risk. Even healthy banks can become endangered because they also do not keep enough cash on hand to repay all customers at once. If banks kept all their deposits locked up in a safe, they could not earn the money that allows them to pay interest.

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Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary.Valerie Plesch for The New York Times

Halting the crisis …

Federal regulators — at the Fed, Treasury Department and other agencies — tried to stem the worries last night by announcing that all customers of both SVB and Signature would have access to their money today. Before the announcement, it was unclear what would happen to deposits of greater than $250,000; a pre-existing guarantee from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation covers only deposits below that amount.

Some SVB clients had indicated that they would be unable to pay their employees if they lost their money, which could lead to spiraling economic problems.

Last night’s announcement has the benefit of reducing the likelihood of a panic today. It also prevents seemingly innocent victims — the workers and executives at companies that used SVB or Signature as their bank — from being hurt. Federal officials emphasized that they would not use taxpayer money to repay those companies. Ultimately, the money will instead come from a mix of the two banks’ assets and from a broader insurance program financed by other banks.

But if the panic spreads, taxpayers would be on the hook, as happened during the financial crisis of 2007-9, because the insurance program would be too small to cover the losses. That risk highlights the fact that there are two different policy questions to keep in mind in coming days — one immediate and one longer term.

The immediate question is how to keep this situation from turning into a full-blown crisis. History suggests that an aggressive and generous government response, like the guaranteeing of all SVB deposits, probably has the best chance of success. The 2007-9 crisis never turned into a depression, partly because of the aggressiveness of the Fed and both the Bush and Obama administrations.

… and avoiding the next one

The longer-term question is how to reduce the chance of future crises, and the historical lessons here are different. The U.S. has suffered so many financial panics over the past few decades, dating to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, because the country tends to regulate its banks so lightly.

In the case of SVB, regulators allowed it to make risky bets with its deposits (while the bank’s executives insisted that the bets weren’t risky). More generally, SVB and other banks are often not required to maintain enough of a financial cushion to withstand a crisis. Financial cushions — effectively, cash or other forms of insurance — tend to reduce banks’ profits, which is why bankers resist them. But without a healthy cushion, a bank can collapse during a crisis, and taxpayers must sometimes bail it out. When that happens, the bankers and their investors often emerged unscathed.

Once SVB began to falter, financial industry executives and investors again began clamoring for government help. In the short term, the government may indeed need to step in to avoid a spreading crisis. But the less immediate questions may be uncomfortable for the bankers: How can the people who caused this crisis bear financial responsibility for it? And how can the U.S. economy end this cycle of booms that benefit banks and busts that hurt everyone else?

Noah Smith, an economist and Substack writer, offers this useful bit of history in his newsletter:

In 2008, the bankers who made the bad decisions that led to the financial crisis generally got to keep their (very lucrative) jobs after getting bailed out. And their banks continued to exist as well, and even got government to guarantee them some profits going forward. Even as normal people suffered mass unemployment and the loss of their careers and livelihoods, many of the people responsible for the disaster kept collecting million-dollar checks and being in respected positions of power, now with government guarantees. If that seemed unfair, it’s because it was unfair.

For more

  • Asian stocks were mixed, with indexes in Tokyo down and markets up in Hong Kong. In Europe, major indexes were sharply lower.
  • Futures are suggesting that the U.S. market may open flat from Friday’s close, which capped the market’s worst week this year.
  • HSBC will buy SVB’s British subsidiary (for one pound).
  • Some of the worst casualties of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse are start-ups developing climate change solutions.
  • Etsy, Roku, Vox Media: These are some of the companies that had money at SVB.
  • Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U.S. banking system was safe and well capitalized. President Biden will speak about the issue this morning.
  • These bank failures are the result of leaders in Washington weakening the financial rules, Senator Elizabeth Warren argues in Times Opinion.
 

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International
 
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Trees downed by a tornado in Canada.Northern Tornadoes Project/Western University
 
Opinions

Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Tucker Carlson and Biden’s dead-on-arrival budget.

Michelle Yeoh is grateful for the Oscar, but wants you to help the victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, she writes.

Awarding Oscars by gender hurts nonbinary actors and shapes our perception of good acting for the worse, Isaac Butler says.

 
 

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MORNING READS

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A sketch of a building in Philadelphia, left, and of one in New York.Larry Buchanan

25-story Rubik’s cube: Turning an office building into apartments isn’t easy.

Setting boundaries: It’s tricky but doable with a difficult family member.

Restored glory: Can Carnival become a force for positive change in Angola?

Quiz time: Take our latest news quiz and share your score (the average was 8.3).

Metropolitan Diary: She craved solemn shelter from the world.

Lives Lived: Kenzaburo Oe was a Nobel laureate who used his powerful novels and essays to criticize postwar Japan. He died at 88.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

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South Carolina’s Bree Hall.Eakin Howard/Getty Images

March Madness: The N.C.A.A. Tournament brackets are out. Alabama, Houston, Kansas and Purdue are at the top of the men’s tournament, and South Carolina, Indiana, Stanford and Virginia Tech were named the top seeds in the women’s.

Predictions: The Athletic predicts these 10 first-round matchups are ripe for upsets on the men’s side. On the women’s side, the No. 1 Gamecocks are favorites to repeat as national champions.

Trading a star: The cornerback Jalen Ramsey is headed to the Miami Dolphins.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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“Everything Everywhere All at Once” had a big night at the Academy Awards.Noel West for The New York Times

‘Everything’ wins big

“Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the dimension-jumping family drama won seven Oscars last night, including for best picture, as well as acting awards for Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis and Ke Huy Quan.

“Ladies, don’t let anybody ever tell you that you are ever past your prime,” Yeoh, the first Asian woman to win best actress, said. She and Quan also made history as the first two Asian actors to win in one year.

Other big wins: The German-language “All Quiet on the Western Front” won four awards including best international film. Brendan Fraser, nominated for the first time, won best actor for his performance as an obese professor in “The Whale.” Here’s the complete list.

Style: The stars wore a range of colors and mixed classic with experimental. These were the best (and worst) outfits.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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David Malosh for The New York Times

Sopa de fideo is good for a chilly weeknight.

 
Spring Break Travel
 
What to Read

A midcentury Japanese novelist keeps finding fans on TikTok.

 
Now Time to Play
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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was emotivity. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: First-string players (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. Meet The Times’s first Local Investigations Fellows, including reporters covering health care in Mississippi and the opioid crisis in Maryland.

The Daily” asks: What is E.S.G., and why are Republicans so mad about it?

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Brent Lewis, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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Good morning. Deregulation contributed to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.

 
 
 
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Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, Calif.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Stopping the fallout

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and others — and the government’s rescue over the weekend — left many of us again rushing to understand the arcane details of the financial system. It can be maddeningly complex, so I want to use today’s newsletter to explain some of the basics.

First, the latest: Bank stocks plummeted yesterday, hitting midsize and smaller institutions in particular. Other financial markets gyrated as well, despite U.S. policymakers’ emergency help for customers of the closed banks. “It didn’t put calm back in the system,” said my colleague Maureen Farrell, who covers business.

Why does this matter to everyday Americans? After all, SVB is relatively small and most of us keep no money in it.

The short answer is the potential for wider fallout. When banks collapse, other people sometimes fear that their own banks and investments will follow. Even healthy banks don’t keep enough cash on hand to pay out all depositors, so if too many people panic at once and pull out their money — a classic bank run — it could lead to broader financial and economic calamity. And that is what the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve are trying to stop: a financial crisis largely prompted by plunging confidence.

The collapse

How did we get to this point? To answer that, I need to dive into more detail about Silicon Valley Bank.

As its name suggests, the bank portrayed itself as focused on the leading edge of technology. And it served thousands of tech firms. Yet SVB invested their money in something much less exciting, as Paul Krugman wrote: U.S. bonds, effectively I.O.U.s from the federal government.

Because the federal government has always paid its bills, U.S. bonds are widely considered the safest investment. SVB’s experience shows there are moments when even these safe investments may not pay off. The details get technical, but they’re worth unpacking to understand what went wrong.

Bonds are effectively money that the government borrows from buyers — the public — before paying them back later, with interest. Market conditions and the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, help determine that interest rate.

When SVB bought bonds, interest rates were very low. Since then, the Federal Reserve, which sets certain influential rates, increased those to combat rising prices. Now, new bonds can carry interest multiple times higher than those SVB bought.

Imagine, then, that you want to buy bonds today. You would want the newer bonds because they have a higher payout. So when SVB needed to sell bonds, to raise cash that it could use for its customers’ withdrawals, it could do so only for a discount, taking a loss.

The bank failed to follow basic financial advice: Diversify your portfolio. “It’s not fraud,” said Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “But it’s an extremely risky, and obviously risky, strategy.”

In the past few weeks, venture capitalists and other wealthy customers on social media and in private chats started discussing concerns that SVB could no longer pay its depositors. Some began to move their money out of the bank, and the situation spiraled quickly. “Once you start asking, ‘Are we having a bank run?,’ it’s too late,” my colleague David Enrich, a business editor, said.

A regulatory failure

Financial regulations are supposed to stop these kinds of crises. But Silicon Valley Bank’s problems were not caught until it was too late — which many experts say was a result of insufficient oversight. (Here’s what to know about how your own money is covered.)

Under pressure from banks in 2018, Congress passed bipartisan legislation that Donald Trump signed into law shielding smaller banks, like SVB, from more stringent rules. The banks argued that they were so small that they posed little risk to the broader financial system.

SVB’s collapse and the aftermath suggest the banks’ claims were wrong: Even smaller bank failures can threaten the financial system as a whole, prompting some experts — but not all — to call for the federal government to get more involved.

Controlled slowdown

To readers of this newsletter, the Federal Reserve’s involvement in containing the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse may be puzzling. The Fed, after all, has been raising interest rates to slow the economy. An economic slowdown inherently involves businesses, including banks, failing.

The Fed’s concern is that the bank collapses could go too far and pose bigger systemic risks beyond SVB. Think of it this way: You can stop a runaway car by blowing out its tires, potentially causing a crash. But it would be better if the car stopped by simply braking. Officials are trying to get the economy to brake to a safer speed — one in which inflation isn’t so high.

The economic slowdown that the Fed hopes for would still affect everyday Americans, in both lower prices and also potentially higher unemployment rates. But that outcome is better than an uncontrolled bank run that topples the financial system and takes the rest of the economy, and your 401(k), down with it.

More news

 

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics
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President Biden, flanked by the leaders of Australia and Britain.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
 
War in Ukraine
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Opening $1,200 champagne bottles at a Russian restaurant in the United Arab Emirates. Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

Working from home can hurt our health, Dr. Jordan Metzl writes.

Politicians won’t solve America’s immigration problem until they stop thinking of it as just a border crisis, Dara Lind argues.

Pollution from oil and gas extraction can cause cancer and birth defects. Stronger government rules would help, Dr. Dona Upson says.

 
 

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Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, an Olympic gold medalist in slopestyle.Tom Monterosso/Natural Selection Tour

Natural Selection: The start line for this treacherous snowboarding contest is a helicopter.

3.14: On Pi Day, celebrate the history of the fundamental number.

Oscar dominance: An indie studio, A24, won big by going its own way.

Spider fight: There’s a war in your garage. The brown widows are winning.

“Our World Cup”: In Miami, a global baseball tournament feels like a party.

Advice from Wirecutter: Scooters your kid will love.

Lives Lived: Patricia Schroeder was a feminist legislator who helped redefine the role of women in American politics. She died at 82.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

Still in the mix: Gregg Berhalter is eligible to again coach the national U.S. men’s soccer team, investigators looking into his personal conduct concluded.

An absence: The Grizzlies star Ja Morant is in Florida to seek counseling, with no timetable for his return.

 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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Nancy Yao is president of the Museum of Chinese in America.The Museum of Chinese in America

Closer to reality

The Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum is early in development. But the institution took a major step yesterday, naming Nancy Yao, the president of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, as its founding director.

More than two years after Congress approved its creation, the Women’s History Museum has yet to decide on an architect, a location or its collection. But it already has more than $55 million in pledged donations from philanthropists, including Melinda French Gates, Tory Burch and the Walmart billionaire Alice Walton.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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James Ransom for The New York Times

Add a few dollops of ricotta on this pasta alla vodka.

 
What to Watch

Stream the Oscar winners, including “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and the best documentary feature, “Navalny.”

 
What to Read

Lockdown with grandma is a mixed blessing in “Künstlers in Paradise,” Cathleen Schine’s new novel.

 
Late Night

The hosts joked about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

 
Now Time to Play
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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was flexion. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Floating chunk of ice (four letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German

P.S. The Times’s Shane O’Neill will chat with Paris Hilton about her memoir live on Twitter at 2:15 p.m. Eastern.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 15, 2023

 

Good morning. Why is Israel descending into political turmoil so far into Netanyahu’s career?

 
 
 
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Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.Pool photo by Maya Alleruzzo

‘At fever pitch’

Political leaders who have already been in office for more than 15 years — which is how long Benjamin Netanyahu has been Israel’s prime minister — do not typically upend their country’s politics. Yet that’s what Netanyahu has done in recent weeks.

His government’s proposal to reduce the power of Israel’s Supreme Court has created what our Opinion colleague Thomas Friedman calls the nation’s “biggest internal clash since its founding.” Hundreds of thousands of Israelis — approaching 5 percent of the population — participated in protests last weekend. Ehud Barak, a former prime minister, has encouraged Israelis to engage in civil disobedience if the proposal becomes law. And many military officers have said they would refuse to report for duty.

Bret Stephens, another Times Opinion columnist — who has often been sympathetic to Netanyahu’s policies — has criticized the judicial plan as a threat to Israel’s moral standing. “Hyper-personalized, populist rule achieved by gutting institutional checks and balances is how democracies devolve into mobocracies,” Bret wrote.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll explain why the later stages of Netanyahu’s political career are turning out to be more chaotic than anything that came before.

What changed?

Netanyahu has always been on Israel’s political right, but he was long able to build alliances with the center. The Israeli left, by contrast, has been marginalized and has not led the government since 2001.

One important cause was the breakdown of peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the early 2000s. The failure of those talks — including the Palestinian leadership’s walking away from the Camp David negotiations in 2000 — led many Israeli voters to give up on the idea of peace and support conservative parties. Netanyahu often led the coalitions that spanned the center and right.

But in 2019, while he was prime minister, Netanyahu was indicted on corruption and bribery charges. Many politicians who agree with his Likud party on substantive issues decided that he needed to resign. “Israel’s centrist parties are willing to serve in a coalition with Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud in charge,” Matti Friedman, a journalist who lives in Israel, wrote for The Free Press. “But they will no longer serve under Netanyahu himself: The prime minister, a master of the political maneuver, has simply lied to too many people too many times.”

This refusal, combined with the continued popularity of the political right, has thrown Israeli politics into turmoil. The country has held five elections since 2019. Likud received the largest share of votes — 23 percent — in the most recent election. Even so, Netanyahu was able to put together a governing coalition only by allying with far-right and religious parties.

The current government, as a result, is more radical than the previous governments Netanyahu led.

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Israel’s Supreme Court.Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

Why the Supreme Court?

Israel’s Supreme Court has something in common with the U.S. version: Both are among the most powerful courts in the world. In many other countries, the top court does not overturn major laws and instead tends to make modest, technocratic changes. In Israel and the U.S., the court often has the last word. (In Israel, the underlying reason is the lack of a constitution.)

The proposed changes by Netanyahu’s government would strengthen the authority of the legislature, which in Israel is known as the Knesset. It is already more powerful than the U.S. Congress, because there is no independently elected president; a majority of legislators choose the prime minister. If the judicial changes go through, the Knesset would also gain the power to override Supreme Court decisions and would have few checks on its power.

Yesterday, the Knesset passed an initial version of some of the changes. Lawmakers will have to vote twice more before the policies becomes law.

Some political commentators argue that the changes themselves are reasonable. “What’s at stake here isn’t the death of the nation’s democracy, but straightforward party politics,” Lahav Harkov of The Jerusalem Post wrote. “The discussion is, in fact, about the proper balance between different elements of a democracy.”

Many other analysts disagree, arguing that the reforms would allow a prime minister to dismantle democracy, much as Viktor Orban has done in Hungary. “Theoretically, you could end up with a government that decides that elections are going to take place once every 20 years,” our colleague Isabel Kershner said.

Either way, the changes have inspired intense anger because they would give Netanyahu’s government sweeping power to implement its preferred policies.

“Underlying this technical debate about the judiciary is a much broader conflict about what kind of society Israel should be,” Patrick Kingsley, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, told us. “Ultra-Orthodox Jews and settler activists are taking advantage of the fact that they wield unprecedented power in Israeli society and government to try to unravel the influence of the court.”

The stakes

Netanyahu and his far-right allies have different incentives to neutralize the court.

For Netanyahu, a court that was subservient to Israeli’s legislature would allow him to end his own corruption trial, which is still taking place. Netanyahu has denied he would do so.

For far-right parties, a neutered court would help the Knesset to enact major policy priorities — such as making it easier for settlers to seize land in the West Bank; protecting government subsidies for religious schools; and helping ultra-Orthodox Israelis avoid mandatory military service.

One reason for the intensity of the debate is the polarization between Israelis who are part of Netanyahu’s coalition and who are outside of it. He has appointed ultranationalist figures to major posts, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, who threatened Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin weeks before his 1995 assassination and publicly thanked a rabbi who justified Rabin’s murder. Ben-Gvir is now the national security minister.

“Israeli society is at fever pitch,” Patrick said.

 

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THE LATEST NEWS

The Economy
  • Annual inflation fell to 6 percent last month, still uncomfortably high.
  • That presents the Federal Reserve with a dilemma: Bank turmoil is a reason to pause interest rate hikes. High inflation is a reason to continue.
  • The shares of midsize and regional banks rose again after days of sharp falls, easing pressure on the industry.
  • At first, some government officials didn’t think Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse could imperil the entire financial system. Signs of bank runs changed their minds.
  • The Justice Department is investigating the collapse, with a possible focus on executives’ recent stock sales.
  • Meta, the owner of Facebook, is laying off 10,000 employees, its second round of cuts since November.
 
War in Ukraine
  • A Russian warplane collided with a U.S. drone over the Black Sea, the first known physical contact between the two militaries since the war started.
  • Russians, fleeing their country, have reshaped the societies in places like Georgia and Armenia.
  • Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and other Republicans criticized Ron DeSantis for saying that protecting Ukraine is not a vital U.S. interest.
 
Other Big Stories
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A California resident outside her laundry business yesterday.Nic Coury for The New York Times
 
Opinions

Millennials are hitting middle age, Jessica Grose writes. How are they feeling?

Pope Francis’ confrontational style and incomplete reforms have widened the Catholic Church’s internal divisions, Ross Douthat argues.

 
 

Ends soon: The All Access sale.

Readers of The Morning can save on all of The Times, but not for long. Subscribe to All Access today to enjoy everything we offer — News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic.

 

MORNING READS

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“High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon National Park, California.”The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Cantor Arts Center. The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University.

Photo mystery: Tracking down the exact spot of an enigmatic image by Ansel Adams.

Shipwreck: A silk dress survived more than 300 years on the bottom of the sea. Who wore it?

Fake art and stolen Super Bowl rings: This F.B.I. crime team is busy.

Advice from Wirecutter: Tools to ride out a winter storm.

Lives Lived: The novelist John Jakes wrote generational family sagas of the American Revolution and the Civil War that became best sellers. He died at 90.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

Your March Madness bracket: The First Four is underway, but you still have time to complete your bracket. The Athletic has strategies.

Getting a deal done: Aaron Rodgers could be a Jet soon, but he reportedly has a wish list before he makes the move.

Hello, 48: The 2026 World Cup will be bigger and longer. The tournament will feature 48 teams, up from 32, and 104 matches.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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The New York Times

A.I. gets smarter

ChatGPT could be getting an upgrade. OpenAI, the company behind the artificial intelligence chatbot, announced the release of GPT-4 yesterday — a more sophisticated version of the technology powering the chatbot that has upended Silicon Valley. The Times’s technology reporter says it’s an improvement, but some of the same problems remain.

What it can do: It has learned to be more precise and accurate. It can ace the Uniform Bar Exam, offer medical advice to doctors and give detailed descriptions of images.

What it can’t do: The technology still doesn’t understand what is true or not. And it can’t come up with original ideas or discuss the future.

For more: Despite being around for more than a decade, virtual assistants like Siri lost the A.I. race.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Toss brussels sprouts with olive oil or bacon fat, salt and pepper and roast them.

 
Where to Eat

Fine dining rarely has much to say about the state of the country. This new restaurant does, Pete Wells writes.

 
Books

Read your way through Miami.

 
Late Night
 
Now Time to Play
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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was glamour. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: City that’s home to the Galleria Borghese (four letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. Paul Sonne, who was a Moscow-based intern when he got his first Times byline in 2005, is joining the paper as a Russia correspondent.

The Daily” is about the Covid lab leak theory.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 16, 2023

 

Good morning. March Madness, a sporting event that even nonfans follow, starts today. We have a preview.

 
 
 
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Caitlin Clark taking a shot for the Iowa Hawkeyes.Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images

Three weeks, 126 games

For many Americans, the next few days are among the most entertaining of the year. They will be filled with dozens of college basketball games, featuring major surprises and thrilling finishes. When a team loses, its season is over.

The main portion of the men’s March Madness starts today, and the women’s tournament follows tomorrow. Both will continue for almost three weeks. They are among the few sporting events that capture the attention of nonfans, thanks to college loyalties and the ubiquity of brackets.

Today’s newsletter offers a preview, with help from our colleagues at The Times and The Athletic.

If I can offer one personal tip, try to find time to watch the Iowa women’s team. Its star, Caitlin Clark, a West Des Moines native, may be the country’s most entertaining player (as this Washington Post profile explains). Her fans include LeBron James and Kevin Durant. Clark is known for hitting “logo threes,” shots from so far away that she is standing near the half-court logo.

Who are the men’s favorites?

No team looks dominant. Oddsmakers like Houston, an athletic crew with a terrifying defense. Alabama — the No. 1 overall seed — and Kansas aren’t far behind. Purdue, with 7-foot-4 Canadian star Zach Edey, is intriguing. The Wall Street Journal calls U.C.L.A. the most underappreciated potential winner.

Who are the women’s favorites?

The women’s tournament does have a heavy favorite: South Carolina, the defending champion, which hasn’t lost a game this season. Its star is Aliyah Boston, the likely No. 1 pick in this year’s W.N.B.A. draft. Longtime powerhouses UConn and Stanford are also in the mix, as are Maryland, Indiana, Utah — and Iowa, which won the recent tournament in the Big Ten, the strongest conference.

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Dylan Buell/Getty Images

Can I get bracket advice?

Don’t worry about a few losses. Surprising as it may sound, there has never been a confirmed perfect bracket in decades of March Madness. With 63 games in each bracket, there are 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes, which means that the millions of people who fill out a bracket still cover only a tiny share of the scenarios.

Don’t pick only No. 1 seeds. “Fans tend to rate No. 1 seeds or well-known teams as more likely to win the tournament than experts do,” Josh Katz and Alice Fang of The Times explain. Lower-seeded men’s teams that have a chance to go far, according to the experts, include San Diego State, Creighton, Tennessee and Providence. (This table lets you compare public picks with expert analysis.)

The Athletic’s Seth Davis picked both No. 12 seed Charleston and No. 14 seed U.C. Santa Barbara (the mighty Gauchos!) to make the Sweet 16 on the men’s side. A statistical analysis from The Athletic gives No. 13 seed Furman almost a 40 percent chance to beat No. 4 seed Virginia.

Typically, the women’s bracket has fewer upsets than the men’s bracket. In the past five years, 19 of 20 Final Four berths went to No. 1 and 2 seeds, with one berth going to a No. 3 seed.

Your pool size matters. The more people in your pool, the more risks you should take. In a smaller group, more conservative choices are smart. This basic bit of game theory may be the simplest way to improve your chances.

Or just have fun. Call it the Diane Chambers strategy, after the “Cheers” character who won the bar’s football pool by taking into account uniform colors, symphony orchestras and other factors. In March Madness, you could make your picks based on mascots: Cats have won a lot, humans not so much. I know a Southerner with a penchant for picking whichever team has the lower latitude.

Any feel-good teams?

Virginia Tech has become a top women’s team behind Elizabeth Kitley. Head coach Kenny Brooks recruited Kitley partly by winning over her sister, Raven, who has become an advocate for autism awareness.

It’s bizarre to describe Duke as a feel-good story, given its status as the most hated team in men’s basketball, but this year, it may be true. The Blue Devils had a turbulent start under new head coach Jon Scheyer, who succeeded the legendary Mike Krzyzewski, but they are now playing very well. Duke is a dangerous No. 5 seed.

Still, we realize most fans can’t root for Duke, so you could also consider Gonzaga and its bearded star, Drew Timme. “We have come to Drew Timme for sentimentality and melancholy, hoping to strum his heartstrings as he prepares for his last March ride,” Dana O’Neil writes in The Athletic.

Who will be Cinderella?

Nobody knows. The best part about Cinderellas — like St. Peter’s, the pride of Jersey City, last year — is that they’re unexpected. In the women’s bracket, maybe it will be Princeton or Florida Gulf Coast, which was founded in 1991 and already has more March Madness upsets than most universities.

On the men’s side, Howard, the alma mater of Vice President Kamala Harris and Chadwick Boseman, is making its first tournament appearance since 1992. Here’s a guide to top players on lesser-known teams, like Kent State and Oral Roberts.

How about some history?

“Dream On,” a three-part ESPN documentary, explains how the women’s game got so big, by telling the story of the 1996 Olympic team. The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch called it the best sports documentary he saw last year. It features a few major figures in this year’s March Madness, including Dawn Staley, who now coaches South Carolina.

Join our bracket

We’ve made groups on ESPN’s Tournament Challenge for readers of The Morning to compete with each other. Here are links for the men’s and women’s tournaments. Submit your men’s bracket by noon Eastern today and your women’s bracket by noon Eastern tomorrow. We’ll mail a Morning coffee mug to one winner from each bracket.

More N.C.A.A. coverage

 
 

Programming note: I still hear from readers who don’t know about the All Access subscription — which lets you read all The Times’s news and opinion coverage as well as everything from Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic. You can subscribe to All Access here.

 

THE LATEST NEWS

The Economy
  • Credit Suisse is borrowing up to $54 billion from the Swiss central bank to ward off concerns about its financial health. (Today, its stock jumped in Europe in response.)
  • While Credit Suisse’s problems are different from those of the U.S. banks that recently collapsed, the situation is adding to a sense of dread about the global financial system.
  • Markets were down in Asia today, a sign that investors are still nervous. Markets were up in Europe and poised to open slightly down in the U.S.
 
International
 
Other Big Stories
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Fresh seaweed in South Korea.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
 
Opinions

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed because of hubris, Elizabeth Spiers writes.

A filmmaker interviewed American soldiers in Iraq in 2003. Now veterans, they try to make sense of the war.

If the world is to recover from Covid, we need to invest as many health resources in the pandemic’s aftermath as we did at its start, Dr. Atul Gawande writes.

 

MORNING READS

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Grazing at a farm near Toulouse, France.Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

Family tree: Behold, the ancient origins of the donkey.

New moon suit: Space fashion is getting an upgrade.

A morning listen: Stop looking for the perfect partner.

Advice from Wirecutter: The expensive colored pencils really are better.

Lives Lived: Bobby Caldwell, a silky-voiced master of so-called blue-eyed soul, was perhaps best known for his R&B hit “What You Won’t Do for Love.” He died at 71.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

Ja Morant: The N.B.A. suspended the Memphis Grizzlies guard for eight games because he livestreamed a video of himself holding a gun in a nightclub.

A return: Days after a report focused on his family, Gio Reyna will return to the U.S. men’s national soccer team roster before two games this month.

 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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Marilyn MayeClark Hodgin for The New York Times

The unsinkable Marilyn Maye

Marilyn Maye is the last of a great generation of American Songbook singers. She was a favorite of Ella Fitzgerald’s and made dozens of appearances on “The Tonight Show.” Next week, just before her 95th birthday, she’s making her Carnegie Hall solo debut.

It’s the crowning moment of an eight-decade career and the most important night of her life. It’s also only one gig in a year of travel, devoted audiences, parties, mentoring, master classes and concerts. “I am 95 f-ing years old,” Maye told The Times. “I don’t have time to be a larger star. I don’t have time to be any more than this night.”

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Kerri Brewer for The New York Times

Chicken manchurian is popular at Chinese restaurants in South Asia.

 
Travel

With custom cocktails, Belgrade is becoming one of Europe’s best bar destinations.

 
Late Night
 
Now Time to Play
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The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were deputize and deputized. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Planet’s path (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. Hugh Jackman endorsed Times Cooking’s no-yeast cinnamon rolls.

The Daily” is about French protests over the retirement age.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 17, 2023

 

Good morning. America’s neediest are dealing with food stamp cuts and rising prices at the same time.

 
 
 
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A Dollar General in Lexington, S.C., in 2021.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

A ‘hunger cliff’

Earlier this year, millions of Americans got a notice: Your food budget is about to be cut, potentially by hundreds of dollars a month. Here are some tips on how you can manage. You can’t appeal.

The notices signaled the coming end of a federal increase in food stamps that started in the early days of the pandemic, when unemployment spiked and lawmakers feared that hunger would, too.

The cuts come at a particularly bad time for low-income Americans. Grocery prices increased 10 percent over the past year, according to data released this week. It amounts to a one-two punch: The country’s neediest have less aid to pay for food as it’s getting more expensive.

The big question is what happens now. Some experts have warned that the country is approaching a “hunger cliff,” with the number of Americans going hungry likely to spike this spring. To buy food, other families may have to use money that would otherwise have gone to rent or other bills — and fall behind on those payments.

The stress on family food budgets represents a tangible example of how a recent rise in the nation’s poverty rate is affecting people’s lives. The poverty rate fell sharply in 2021 — to 7.8 percent by one measure, from 11.8 percent in 2019 — thanks mostly to economic relief laws that Congress passed in response to Covid. But Congress has let many provisions expire, and the poverty rate rose in 2022 as a result.

“It is a very large and abrupt change,” said Ellen Vollinger of Food Research and Action Center, an advocacy group. “The hardship will fall on these families.”

Emergencies’ end

We already have a glimpse of how the food stamp cuts will play out. This month’s cuts ended the expanded benefits in the 32 states that still had them, but 18 states had already revoked their extra benefits. In those 18 states, food insecurity, which measures insufficient access to food, rose more quickly than in states that kept the benefits, researchers at Northwestern University and the Jain Family Institute found.

These charts from my colleague Ashley Wu show the trend in four of the states that cut food stamps earlier. The data fluctuates. But generally, more households struggled to get enough to eat after the cuts:

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Sources: Jack Landry, Jain Family Institute; U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey | Data is through August 2022. | By The New York Times

The situation could get worse. When many of those 18 states cut benefits, food prices were rising less quickly than they have been more recently. The government adjusts food stamps for inflation, but only once a year, in October. So if prices keep rising quickly, the real value of food stamps will fall behind for the next several months.

Food stamp benefits will still be higher than they were before the pandemic because the Biden administration separately increased them in 2021. But those increases don’t outweigh the end of emergency benefits for many recipients, meaning their food budgets will still decrease.

Some conservatives say the warnings are overblown. Angela Rachidi of the American Enterprise Institute argued that the effects of the emergency benefits were exaggerated and that they were always supposed to be temporary.

Return to normal

Ultimately, the food stamp cuts will probably push more people — potentially millions more — into poverty, said Megan Curran of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. That increase will largely erase what remains of recent years’ progress on the issue.

In that sense, the food stamp cuts fit into a broader story: During the pandemic, the U.S. expanded its safety net to prevent the worst outcomes of a crashing economy. Those policies worked to keep people out of poverty. But now that the economy has recovered from the initial pandemic shock, Congress is letting the safety net shrink back down. And poverty is rising back to where it once was.

Related: We know how to end poverty in the U.S. We just don’t want to, Matthew Desmond writes in Times Opinion.

 

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THE LATEST NEWS

The Economy
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A First Republic Bank branch in Manhattan.Casey Steffens for The New York Times
 
War in Ukraine
 
Politics
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

DeSantis and Donald Trump may seem to have a lock on the 2024 Republican primary, but their dominance is unstable, David Brooks says.

The British National Health Service is exhausted, Allyson Pollock and Peter Roderick write.

Ronald Reagan saw Russia’s threat. He wouldn’t recognize many Republicans’ position on Ukraine, David French argues.

 
 

The All Access sale ends soon.

If you’re reading The Morning, it’s a new day — and another opportunity to take advantage of the All Access sale before it ends. Enjoy special savings on everything The Times offers. Carpe diem, and subscribe today.

 

MORNING READS

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Camp Naru in Copake, N.Y.Christopher Lee for The New York Times

Coming of age: This summer camp gives kids a place where they feel like they belong.

Binge, again: Why are people rewatching “Girls”?

Modern Love: She bought a burial plot for her almost-ex-husband’s girlfriend but didn’t guess who might end up there instead.

A film critic’s goodbye: A.O. Scott conducts his own exit interview after more than 20 years of reviews.

Advice from Wirecutter: These are the best raincoats.

Lives Lived: Lynn Seymour was a radically original dancer in British ballet history and a star on both sides of the Atlantic. She died at 83.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

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Blake Peters of the Princeton Tigers celebrates.Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Takeaways from Day 1: The men’s N.C.A.A. tournament delivered two Cinderellas yesterday. Furman beat Virginia, and Princeton beat Arizona. This was the shot that shocked Virginia, thrilled Furman and welcomed March Madness.

Breaking records: Zach Edey, Purdue’s 7-foot-4 star, is on the cusp of making N.C.A.A. history. Can he make 3-pointers?

Multiple options: Coach Rick Pitino, 70, is having a career resurgence. His Iona Gaels are in the N.C.A.A. tournament, and he may have his choice of higher-profile jobs this off-season.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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Young people were asked to carry boxes holding artifacts to a mass gravesite at Wounded Knee, S.D.Tara Rose Weston for The New York Times

Debate over sacred items

Colleges and museums across the U.S. are facing pressure to return stolen Native American cultural items. But what happens after the objects are returned?

Tribes are confronting complicated questions about how to handle repatriation in ways that honor the past and facilitate healing for the living. Some members believe the objects should be given to descendants; others say they should be buried, or placed in the tribes’ own museums.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Christopher Simpson for The New York Times

Guinness pairs perfectly with three kinds of chocolate in dense brownies.

 
What to Watch

Fresh off the finale of “Better Call Saul,” Bob Odenkirk is the star of the new AMC series “Lucky Hank.”

 
Broadway

A revival of “Parade,” a Tony winner from the 1990s, puts enhanced emphasis on its love story, to great effect.

 
News Quiz
 
Late Night

Jimmy Kimmel joked about Trump’s new lawyer.

 
Now Time to Play
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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was daytime. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Very affectionate (five letters).

Here’s today’s Wordle.

And there’s still time to enter our women’s March Madness bracket. A winner receives a Morning coffee mug.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German

P.S. Henry Fountain, a climate reporter whose name once appeared in a “Jeopardy!” clue, is retiring today after 28 years at The Times.

The Daily” is about the banking crisis. On Slate’s Political Gabfest, David Leonhardt and Emily Bazelon talk about the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 18, 2023

 

Good morning. Like everything else, spring has its adherents and detractors.

 
 
 
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María Jesús Contreras

Spring awakening

I like to be up when it’s dark in the morning, to move sleepily around in the dark, working and sipping coffee and listening to music undistracted. I keep the lights off, which keeps the visual noise off. Outside, only the moon, maybe one neighbor’s television flashing blue and green on the living room wall.

My preference for the pre-dawn isn’t original, but it’s deeply felt. I’m thinking about those deeply felt preferences, the little things we love and loathe, and how each on its own is insignificant but, when taken in aggregate, they make the whole of a personality.

I got into a joking to-and-fro with a friend this week about daylight saving time. When we “spring forward,” she argued, it takes her weeks to adjust, to stop feeling rushed in the mornings, to get over having “lost” an hour. She receives this lost hour as a harbinger of summer, her least favorite time of year, its heat and humidity. I played the smug victor, delighting in my extra hour of morning darkness and its complementary hour of evening light.

I often stumble across this list of Susan Sontag’s likes and dislikes, a quirky assemblage of the mundane and the extraordinary:

Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large longhaired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.

Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food.

Each item taken alone could be passed off as a caprice, but in the list, there are clues to the person — a person who likes babies but dislikes couples, who likes the smell of mowed grass and dislikes the cold. (A fellow vernal equinox partisan, perhaps?) Absent any explanation, the meaning of the list is malleable.

I’ve extolled the virtues of the best-of list before, but the worst-of list has its value too. The lists are shortcuts, ways of knowing each other quickly. It’s why dating profiles and yearbook write-ups are premised on likes and dislikes. Wouldn’t it make things more interesting if, when you met someone, instead of telling them what you do for a living you told them what you like and dislike? Or at least appended those preferences to your introduction?

One’s likes and dislikes are forever changing, too, which permits a person to be complicated and fickle and to change their mind. Today I like being up early, and daylight saving time. I like the idea of spring, the spring frame of mind (renewal, blossoming), even as it’s 36 degrees outside. I like super-subjective lists of likes and dislikes that may reveal bits of who people really are. Tell me yours.

For more

 
 

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THE WEEK IN CULTURE

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The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” cast after Michelle Yeoh (left) won the Oscar for best actress.Todd Heisler/The New York Times
 

THE LATEST NEWS

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The Federal Reserve.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
  • The banking crisis could make borrowing tougher, a threat to the staying power of the economy’s postpandemic recovery.
  • Silicon Valley Bank was deeply interwoven to an unusual degree into the lives and businesses of tech executives.
  • The World Health Organization accused Chinese officials of hiding data that might link Covid’s origin to illegally traded animals at a market in the city of Wuhan.
  • The Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of American citizens by the Chinese company that owns TikTok.
  • The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Vladimir Putin’s arrest, a highly symbolic step.
  • New York City’s go-to fish rescuer? A beautician from the Bronx.
 

CULTURE CALENDAR

📺 “Lucky Hank” (Sunday): If you’ve been missing Bob Odenkirk since “Better Call Saul” ended last year, you’ll be relieved to learn that he’s back with a new series. In “Lucky Hank,” Odenkirk plays a cranky English professor who gets into hot water with both students and colleagues as he struggles to write his second novel. The series is based on the 1997 book “Straight Man” by Richard Russo, with Paul Lieberstein (“The Office”) and Aaron Zelman (“Silicon Valley”) as showrunners. Our critic James Poniewozik calls it “a sometimes cutting, sometimes empathetic account of the petty battles among people who have found that their career ladders are short a few rungs.” I’m sold.

🎶 “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” (Friday): I recently listened to a fascinating interview with Courtney Love in which she says that Kurt Cobain and Lana Del Rey are the “only two musical geniuses” she’s known. It made me excited for Del Rey’s new album. The singles released so far are lovely, especially “The Grants,” which features vocals from singers who appeared in the 2013 documentary “20 Feet from Stardom.”

 

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RECIPE OF THE WEEK

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David Malosh for The New York Times.

Sheet-Pan Fried Rice

Of all the ways to use a sheet pan, “frying” rice on it might be the least intuitive — which is why Hetty McKinnon’s sheet pan-fried rice is so brilliant. A simple combination of day-old rice, frozen vegetables and some eggs, it gets its irresistible appeal from an umami-rich vegan XO sauce, made from shiitake mushrooms and ginger. One enthusiast’s advice in the notes: Double the sauce, then save the extra to drizzle on noodles, roasted vegetables and even salmon. Also gleaned from the recipe notes: To keep the dish vegan, skip the eggs and add crumbled (pressed) extra-firm tofu in Step 4. This adaptable, 30-minute recipe can be whatever you want it to be.

 

REAL ESTATE

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The old city of Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava in Spain.Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

Good life on the cheap: Americans are moving to Europe seeking a lifestyle they can’t afford in the U.S.

No-dig gardening: Fans insist it actually works.

Three years spent in shelters: A job interview and a housing voucher helped him turn things around.

What you get for $900,000: A three-bedroom house in Houston; a penthouse condominium in Blacksburg, Va.; or a 1928 Tudor Revival home in Minneapolis.

The hunt: They wanted two bedrooms and a view in Manhattan. Which one did they choose? Play our game.

 

LIVING

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I-Hwa Cheng for The New York Times

Hot springs and hikes: Spend 36 hours in Taipei.

Bundle up in style: 24 coat options from the fashion shows.

A.I. travel: One day, a chatbot could hand you a perfect itinerary.

Wedding playlists: Readers picked these 22 tracks.

Pain relief: It’s safe to go to a chiropractor. But be careful with neck manipulation.

 

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Invest in a cookie scoop

If your spring break plans include baking projects, consider investing in a great cookie scoop for more polished-looking cookies, cupcakes, muffins and more. Not only can it create perfectly round, identically sized cookies, it can also portion out muffin batter with minimal mess, or top your cupcakes with the right amount of frosting. Wirecutter experts like the 2-tablespoon Norpro scoop best — it’s one of the essential pastry tools the kitchen team spent hundreds of hours testing. — Marguerite Preston

 

GAME OF THE WEEKEND

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Fairleigh Dickinson players celebrated their upset of top-seeded Purdue.Paul Sancya/Associated Press

N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments: The beauty of the first few days of March Madness is that you don’t need to tune into a specific game. Both the men’s and women’s tournaments are on all day today, from noon till midnight; flip on the TV, or stop by a sports bar, and you’ll probably catch a great game. Potential highlights: Florida Gulf Coast, a No. 12 seed and a favorite pick for a Cinderella run in the women’s tournament, plays at 2:30 p.m. And Furman, which upset Virginia in the men’s bracket, will try to continue its unlikely run against San Diego State at 12:10 p.m.

The latest

 

NOW TIME TO PLAY

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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was clowned. Here is today’s puzzle.

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

Here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 19, 2023

 

Good morning. One business struggles to survive near the tumult of a homeless encampment.

 
 
 
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Joe Faillace at his sandwich shop.Todd Heisler/The New York Times

‘Who’s it working for?’

Joe and Debbie Faillace opened a sandwich shop in Phoenix called Old Station Subs 37 years ago. They planned to build up the business and eventually sell it for enough money to retire. Instead, America’s homelessness crisis disrupted their dreams.

The Faillaces are not homeless themselves. But one of the country’s largest homeless encampments, with 1,100 people, has appeared within blocks of the shop. My colleague Eli Saslow spent dozens of hours with the Faillaces, their workers and customers at Old Station, which has become a front-row seat to chaos. People from the encampment will often come into the restaurant, telling fantastical stories and asking for money. A bullet recently dinged a fence nearby.

The turmoil surrounds them, Eli reported in a story published this weekend about the Faillaces’ plight. People argue, fight and deal and use drugs, much of it out in the open. The police were called an average of eight times a day within a half-mile of the restaurant last year. Hundreds of crimes were reported, including four homicides. The remains of a 20- to 24-week-old fetus were burned and left by a dumpster in November.

Now, Debbie wants out of the neighborhood. But the Faillaces can’t find anyone to buy their restaurant, even as they’ve steadily reduced the price.

“The people suffering the most in these situations are those who are now living unsheltered in the streets,” Eli told me. “But it’s also true that the rising homeless population has had dramatic impacts across cities. It’s Joe and Debbie’s shop, where just existing within that restaurant has become incredibly difficult, but it’s also every other business in that neighborhood.”

How did this become such a big problem? The U.S. builds too little affordable housing, experts say. Rising rates of poverty, mental illness and drug addiction also play roles.

The resulting homelessness crisis has reshaped life not just in Phoenix but also other U.S. cities, where encampments have grown and become more common. “I’m realizing here lately that we’re living in a frigging hellhole,” Joe said. “Us, them, inside, outside. Who’s it working for? When does it stop?”

Read Eli’s story here — his first for The New York Times since he came from The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of compelling narratives about going hungry in the U.S.

Related: “I get to do work that feels human.” Eli reflects on his time reporting this story.

 

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NEWS

War in Ukraine
  • Vladimir Putin made surprise visits to two Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, Crimea and the city of Mariupol, a defiant gesture after an international court issued a warrant for his arrest.
  • The warrant cites Russia’s deportations of Ukrainian children. Moscow has signaled that they will continue.
  • Russian troops are closing in on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, partly by sending unarmed soldiers to near-certain death.
 
International
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A cemetery in Falluja, Iraq. Joao Silva/The New York Times
 
Politics
 
Other Big Stories
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Jalen Wilson, a Kansas Jayhawks player.Michael Reaves/Getty Images
  • Kansas, a No. 1 seed, lost to Arkansas in the men’s basketball tournament. Princeton, a No. 15 seed, beat Missouri to head to the round of 16. See the latest from March Madness.
  • The conspiracy-theory broadcaster Alex Jones is transferring millions of dollars to family and friends as Sandy Hook families seek the $1.4 billion awarded by courts for his lies.
  • Midsize banks are teetering and markets are seesawing after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Here’s a visual guide to the turmoil.
  • Frozen organic strawberries have been recalled over links to five cases of hepatitis A in Washington State.
  • Lawyers are turning to historians as they comb through Colonial-era statutes to litigate modern gun laws.
 

FROM OPINION

“A cultural and psychological project”: Ross Douthat defines “woke” as he sees it.

Banning TikTok would help, but what’s really needed is a comprehensive law to protect Americans’ data, Peter Harrell and Tim Wu write.

Narendra Modi’s modernizing vision is pulling India forward, but his authoritarian streak is dragging it backward, Nicholas Kristof argues.

As Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Chaim Topol helped American Jews see themselves, Sarah Wildman writes.

 
 

The Sunday question: Should the Federal Reserve slow its rate-hike roll?

Continuing to raise interest rates to fight moderating inflation isn’t worth hurting workers and rewarding risk-taking banks, says The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner. Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse was mostly a failure of management and regulation, The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell counters, and inflation remains too high to ease off.

 
 

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MORNING READS

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Radio Man after staking out the stage door to “The Late Show.”Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times

Chasing celebrities’ signatures: Radio Man is one of a kind.

Eras Tour: Taylor Swift is back onstage and performing raw, searing songs, Jon Caramanica writes.

Vows: He misrepresented his age on his Bumble profile. Their first date went well anyway.

Sunday routine: The head of a shelter for young L.G.B.T.Q. adults eats Caribbean food with her family.

Advice from Wirecutter: The best Bluetooth headphones.

Lives lived: Lance Reddick was a prolific actor who played a police commander in “The Wire” and had prominent roles in the “John Wick” movie franchise. He died at 60.

 

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BOOKS

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New releases: A Mozambican emperor, Nazi face transplants and more in these new books.

By the Book: The novelist Mona Simpson keeps Emily Dickinson poems on her bedside table.

Our editors’ picks: “The Queen of Dirt Island,” which follows four generations of women in rural Ireland, and eight other books.

Times best sellers: “When Things Aren’t Going Right, Go Left” is on the children’s picture book best-seller list.

 

THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

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On the cover: The war’s toll is visible inside a Ukrainian psychiatric hospital.

Recommendation: Old wives’ tales have subversive wisdom.

Eat: A cabbage can be the star vegetable.

 

THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For
  • China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, will travel to Russia to meet with Putin tomorrow.
  • The Supreme Court hears the case Arizona v. Navajo Nation tomorrow. It stems from a labyrinth of previous cases, but mostly centers on the Navajo Nation’s water needs and the Colorado River.
  • The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins on Wednesday in the U.S..
  • The Federal Reserve will decide on Wednesday whether to further raise interest rates.
  • The CEO of TikTok will be testifying before congress on Thursday.
 
What to Cook This Week
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James Ransom for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter this week has recipes for both children and adults. The ricotta pasta alla vodka is spicy, creamy and heavy-handed with the booze. The bacon, egg and cheese fried rice is a raucous mash-up that makes use of leftovers. And the mattar paneer — peas and paneer in tomato gravy — is a favorite of young eaters.

 

NOW TIME TO PLAY

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The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were apricot, capacitor and patriotic. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Tibetan priest (four letters).

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.

Here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — German

Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 20, 2023

 

Good morning. If Trump is indicted, this week will be unlike any other in American politics.

 
 
 
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Donald TrumpDesiree Rios/The New York Times

$130,000 for silence

Shortly before a grand jury in New York State indicts somebody, the person typically gets a chance to testify to the jury. The opportunity is a sign that the investigation is wrapping up and that prosecutors are giving the target a chance to tell his or her side of the story. Typically, the target declines to do so and waits to mount a defense until later.

In recent weeks, Manhattan prosecutors invited Donald Trump to testify to a grand jury that is looking into his undisclosed payment of hush money during the 2016 campaign to Stormy Daniels, a porn star with whom he allegedly had an affair. Many legal observers interpreted that step as a sign that the jury could indict Trump soon. Over the weekend, Trump said that he expected to be arrested this week.

If that happens, it would be an unprecedented event. No other U.S. president, sitting or former, has ever been charged with a crime.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll help you prepare for a week that may be unlike any other in American political history. We will walk you through the issues in the Manhattan case and examine the arguments for and against charging Trump. We’ll also lay out the potential political consequences for him, the other 2024 Republican candidates and President Biden.

Hush money, the details

Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Daniels received a $130,000 payment in return for staying silent about a decade-old claim of an affair with Trump. The payment came from Michael Cohen, then Trump’s lawyer, and Trump reimbursed Cohen with personal checks while Trump was president. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to crimes related to the payment and served a prison sentence.

(Here’s the fuller story behind the payoff, by our colleague Michael Rothfeld.)

If the grand jury does bring charges against Trump, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, will oversee the case. And Bragg will likely accuse Trump of covering up the reimbursements to Cohen. Falsifying business records can be a felony in New York if done to conceal another crime. In this case, the other crime could be a violation of election law: Cohen’s payment to Daniels. The most likely charge Trump faces is punishable by up to four years in prison.

Why charge him?

There are two main arguments for doing so: the evidence and the larger context of Trump’s behavior.

  • The evidence that Trump broke the law seems substantial: It includes testimony from Cohen and others, as well as Trump’s personal checks to Cohen. The hush money and the cover-up of it, in the final weeks of a close presidential race, seem to have been a brazen violation of campaign finance rules. To overlook the violation could encourage future candidates to ignore the law, too.
  • It’s true that prosecutors have typically treated presidents with deference, but Trump is not like any other former president. He has repeatedly shown disdain for laws and traditions that predecessors from both parties followed: He told thousands of lies while in office; refused to participate in a peaceful transfer of power; used the power of the presidency to benefit his company; pressured a foreign leader to smear a political rival; and much more. At a certain point, the rule of law becomes meaningless if anybody can repeatedly ignore it.

Why not charge him?

There are also two main arguments for not charging Trump in the New York case:

  • This case would rely on combining two charges — falsifying business records to cover up a campaign finance violation — that New York prosecutors have never before combined in this way. “The case is not a slam dunk, to be sure,” said our colleague Ben Protess, who has been covering the case. (But Ben added that the charges could resonate with a Manhattan jury.) Some legal experts believe that the first criminal charges filed against a former president should not depend on a novel prosecutorial approach.
  • The federal government has a process — honed over decades, by both Democratic and Republican lawyers — for investigating presidents and candidates. (Trump, of course, is also a 2024 presidential candidate.) Local prosecutors have spent far less time thinking about the legal and political impact of doing so. In today’s polarized political environment, it’s not hard to imagine that an indictment in this case could lower the bar for partisan local prosecutors to bring future cases against national politicians.

The political impact

In the short term, an indictment seems likely to help Trump politically. It will draw attention to him, and he often performs best when he has a foil.

As our colleague Maggie Haberman told us: “I do think an indictment, if it happens, will galvanize his supporters. He will describe the case as trivial, a point some Democrats have argued, and he will insist it’s all part of a broader Democratic Party conspiracy against him to help President Biden in his re-election effort. He’s already fund-raising off it, and he will make selling this to his supporters as another instance of him being victimized central to his campaign.”

Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, agreed: “Many G.O.P. elites will defend Trump, and there may even be some limited short-term upside here,” Nate said.

But Nate also thinks the risks to Trump’s 2024 campaign ultimately seem bigger than the potential benefits. An indictment — on top of Trump’s 2020 loss and the poor performance of his allies in the 2022 midterms — could become one more reason for some Republican voters to look for an alternative. “I think there’s plainly much more downside for Trump than upside,” Nate said.

When Maggie asked Liam Donovan, a veteran Republican strategist, for his view, he made a different but related point: An indictment may help Trump in the primary and hurt him in a campaign against Biden. “Legal escalation would be a significant blow in a general election where he needs to broaden his support, but any event that polarizes the primary in terms of pro- or anti-Trump sentiment only serves to harden his core support,” Donovan said.

For more

 

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THE LATEST NEWS

Economy
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The Credit Suisse headquarters in Zurich.Lea Meienberg for The New York Times
 
International
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Silicon Valley Bank and Ron DeSantis’s views on Ukraine.

Banking is a critical form of public infrastructure that we pretend is a private act of risk management, Ezra Klein writes.

 
 

The All Access sale ends soon.

If you’re reading The Morning, it’s a new day — and another opportunity to take advantage of the All Access sale before it ends. Enjoy special savings on everything The Times offers. Carpe diem, and subscribe today.

 

MORNING READS

Golf between calls: Working from home has created an afternoon-fun economy.

Metropolitan Diary: A woman in a feather hat feeding her Pomeranian cannoli.

Quiz time: Take our latest news quiz and share your score (the average was 8.3).

Advice from Wirecutter: How to find the best running shoes for you.

Lives Lived: Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra was a food historian and Puerto Rico’s leading gastronomy expert, defining the island’s cuisine. He died at 67.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

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Mississippi forward Madison Scott, right, shooting.Josie Lepe/Associated Press

An upset: Stanford fell to Ole Miss in the women’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournament yesterday. It’s the first time a No. 1 seed has missed the Sweet 16 since 2009.

Familiar loss: Kansas State knocked Kentucky out of the men’s tournament, fueling simmering resentment between Kentucky’s coach and fan base.

Team U.S.A. advances: The Americans will face either Mexico or Japan in the World Baseball Classic final after last night’s 14-2 romp over Cuba. A win would give Team U.S.A. back-to-back titles.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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Ice in Menomonie, Wis.Erinn Springer

The sound of melting

Scientists who study the climate often record the sounds that ice makes, like the roar of glaciers as they glide and contract. The sounds are so intense that they have become a music genre, one that researchers and artists hope can help people understand global warming in a visceral way.

“When people like me start talking about melting ice, it seems so far-off and unconnected from our everyday lives,” said Grant Deane, a researcher at the University of California‌‌, San Diego. “Music can make those connections.”

Hear it: Listen to a Spotify playlist of ice music.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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John Kernick for The New York Times

Sticky tomato meets crisp cheese in this cheesy white bean-tomato bake. It’s one of the recipes that kids love, a collection of dishes nominated by parents.

 
What to Read

“The Nursery” paints an honest, frightening and claustrophobic picture of new motherhood.

 
Travel
 
Now Time to Play
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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was bullfrog. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Tremble (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. The original World Cup soccer trophy was stolen 57 years ago today in London. A dog named Pickles found it wrapped in newspaper on the ground a week later.

The Daily” is about TikTok.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 21, 2023

 

Good morning. Americans use Fahrenheit, but many climate reports exclusively use Celsius.

 
 
 
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A thermometer reading in Death Valley National Park.Roger Kisby for The New York Times

Clear communication

The world’s top scientists released their latest report yesterday warning that the Earth is on pace for severe damage from climate change. But many Americans might have a hard time understanding the report because the analysis, like those before it, talks about temperatures exclusively in Celsius.

The U.S. is among just a few countries that still use Fahrenheit temperatures. And while Americans are a relatively small audience on a global scale, they are an important one for climate science: The U.S. has historically emitted more planet-warming greenhouse gases than any other country. Improving Americans’ understanding of the issue could be crucial to any push for changes.

Why does excluding Fahrenheit matter? Most Americans lack experiences from their own lives to make sense of scientists’ warnings that the Earth could warm by up to 1.5 degrees Celsius above acceptable levels. To them, it is a small, meaningless number.

By translating that figure to its Fahrenheit equivalent — 2.7 degrees — it can take on a clearer meaning. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist, uses the analogy of a fever: Think about how much worse you feel when you run a fever of 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 2.7 degrees above normal. That fever is the equivalent of what the planet is facing.

Most Americans can grasp that analogy because it speaks to their own experiences. They can’t do that with Celsius. “It is absolutely essential to communicate in terms and language that people understand,” said Hayhoe, who is from Canada, which uses Celsius.

The exclusion of Fahrenheit in scientific reports is not the main obstacle to more action on climate change. Broader science denial and the world’s reliance on fossil fuels are much bigger barriers. But including Fahrenheit figures is a small change — a matter of plugging some numbers into a calculator — that could help drive more action.

Today’s newsletter will look at the new climate report and how close, or not, the world is to avoiding the worst consequences.

Expect more catastrophes

The new analysis, a synthesis of six previous reports by the United Nations’ climate group, presents a mixed picture of the world’s fight against climate change. Here are three takeaways:

1) The world is on track to surpass a significant level of warming. The world is likely to hit what scientists consider relatively safe levels of warming — 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s, the report warned. Countries could still take steps to prevent that, by slashing greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and no longer adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the 2050s. But the required measures are so extreme that they seem increasingly unlikely, many experts say.

2) On the current track, brace for more disasters. Continued warming will mean more catastrophic flooding, deadly heat waves, crop-destroying droughts and other extreme weather. Some of those effects are already visible. Last year, record-breaking heat waves hit much of the world, including the U.S. and Europe, and floods submerged a third of Pakistan.

3) The world has made some real progress. In the past, climate reports warned that warming could surpass four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Today, the Earth is on a trajectory of around two to three degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), thanks to the uptake of cleaner energy and to projections that coal use will decline. That difference of a few degrees can, like a fever, prevent more catastrophic events. And as my colleague Somini Sengupta noted, pivoting away from fossil fuels is the fastest way to stop global warming.

The bottom line

Despite some progress, the world is still on track to face devastating outcomes from climate change. To prevent the worst, scientists are calling for a massive effort that will require the world’s most powerful and richest countries to work together.

Getting so much of the world onboard requires communicating the problem in a way everyone can understand. Excluding the temperature measure used by the U.S. and some other nations hinders that mission. Offering different versions of reports with Celsius and Fahrenheit could help address that issue, or scientists and news outlets could translate Celsius-focused reports to Fahrenheit in their own work.

More on climate change

 

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Xi Jinping, China’s leader, with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. This photograph was released by Russian state media.Sergei Karpukhin/Sputnik, via Reuters
 
Trump Investigation
 
International
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The lower house of the French Parliament on Monday.Lewis Joly/Associated Press
  • France’s retirement age will rise to 64, after Emmanuel Macron’s government narrowly survived a no-confidence motion.
  • The Greek national intelligence service wiretapped an employee of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. She also found spyware on her phone.
  • A report found London’s police to be institutionally racist and sexist, and said the city “no longer has a functioning neighborhood policing service.”
  • The Chinese spy balloon had remote-control steering for parts of its journey. The Times tracked its path.
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

George W. Bush’s global program to fight AIDS was the single best policy of any president in recent decades. He deserves more credit, Nicholas Kristof says in a video.

The Supreme Court let college athletes earn money for endorsements and appearances. The N.C.A.A. is still fighting back, Bomani Jones argues.

For those who live through them, wars never really end, says Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

 
 

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MORNING READS

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Reba McEntire opened a restaurant near where she grew up.Zerb Mellish for The New York Times

Reba to the rescue: Reba McEntire is trying to save her childhood hometown in Oklahoma.

We ❤️ NYC: New York has a new logo. New Yorkers hate it.

Bohemian: A Parisian designer built his dream house in a former brothel.

Advice from Wirecutter: Maximize space in a tiny bedroom.

Lives Lived: Stuart Hodes danced with Martha Graham in the 1940s and kept dancing into his 90s. He died at 98.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

Another No. 1 goes down: Miami shocked No. 1 seed Indiana last night in the women’s N.C.A.A. tournament, the second time in two days a top seed has fallen.

Hall of Fame coach: Rick Pitino is leaving Iona to become the men’s basketball coach at St. John’s.

Last-minute changes? Major League Baseball is considering a proposal from players to tweak its new rules, which debuted at the start of spring training.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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“L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.Ruth Walz

Opera’s next generation

Last summer, American directors headlined several of Europe’s most prestigious opera festivals. That would have been unheard-of even a decade ago, but opera companies are warming to a new generation of Americans with fresh takes.

Many German directors take an intellectual approach to opera, said Louisa Proske of the Halle Opera. “What can be attractive,” she said, “is this kind of propensity to storytelling that I think is more in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.”

In The Times, A.J. Goldmann profiled three American opera directors making a mark in Europe.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Johnny Miller for The New York Times

A sour cream and onion marinade delivers flavor and keeps these fried chicken cutlets juicy.

 
On Broadway

“Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is, by the show’s own admission, almost plotless. But the dancing is excellent.

 
What to Listen To

Depeche Mode is embracing the darkness with the group’s 15th album.

 
Late Night

Jimmy Kimmel called this potential indictment week for Trump “the calm before the Stormy.”

 
Now Time to Play
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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was wheezing. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: #1 choices, informally (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German

P.S. The Times’s next class of newsroom fellows includes a digital cartographer, a physics Ph.D. student and a self-proclaimed Texan New Yorker.

The Daily” is about Xi Jinping traveling to Moscow.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 22, 2023

 

Good morning. The Fed must choose between two unpleasant options today. It’s a reminder of the high cost of weak bank oversight.

 
 
 
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The Federal Reserve building.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Inflation — or turmoil?

The Federal Reserve faces a difficult decision at its meeting that ends this afternoon: Should Fed officials raise interest rates in response to worrisome recent inflation data — and accept the risk of causing further problems for banks? Or should officials pause their rate increases — and accept the risk that inflation will remain high?

This dilemma is another reminder of the broad economic damage that banking crises cause. In today’s newsletter, I’ll first explain the Fed’s tough call and then look at one of the lessons emerging from the current banking turmoil. Above all, that turmoil is a reminder of the high costs of ineffective bank regulation, which has been a recurring problem in the U.S.

The Fed’s dilemma

The trouble for the Fed is that there are excellent reasons for it to continue raising interest rates and excellent reasons for it to take a break.

On the one hand, the economic data in recent weeks has suggested that inflation is not falling as rapidly as analysts expected. Average consumer prices are about 6 percent higher than a year ago, and forecasters expect the figure to remain above 3 percent for most of this year. That’s higher than Fed officials and many families find comfortable. For much of the 21st century, inflation has been closer to 2 percent.

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Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics | By The New York Times

An inflation rate that remains near 4 percent for an extended period is problematic for several reasons. It cuts into buying power and gives people reason to expect that inflation may stay high for years. They will then ask their employers for higher wages, potentially causing a spiral in which companies increase their prices to pay for the raises and inflation drifts even higher. Today’s tight job market, with unemployment near its lowest level since the 1960s, adds to these risks. The economy still seems to be running hotter than is sustainable.

This situation explains why Fed officials had originally planned to continue raising their benchmark interest rate at today’s meeting — thereby slowing the economy by increasing the cost of homes, cars and other items that people buy with debt. Some Fed officials favored a quarter-point increase, which would be identical to the increase at the Fed’s meeting last month. Others preferred a half-point increase, in response to the worrisome recent inflation data.

The banking troubles of the past two weeks scrambled these plans. Why? In addition to slowing the economy, higher interest rates depress the value of many financial assets (as these charts explain). Some bank executives did a poor job planning for these asset declines, and their balance sheets suffered. When customers became worried that the banks would no longer have enough money to return their deposits, a classic bank run ensued. It led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, and others remain in jeopardy.

If Fed officials continue raising their benchmark rate, they risk damaging the balance sheets of more banks and causing new bank runs. That’s why a half-point increase now seems less likely. Some economists (including The Times’s Paul Krugman) have urged the Fed to avoid any additional increases for now. Many analysts expect the Fed will compromise and raise the rate by a quarter point; Jason Furman, a former Obama administration official, leans toward that approach.

The decision is unavoidably fraught. The Fed must choose between potentially exacerbating problems in the financial markets and seeming to go soft on inflation.

Why bailouts happen

All of which underscores the high cost of banking crises. In most industries, a company’s collapse doesn’t cause cascading economic problems. In the financial markets, the collapse of one firm can lead to a panic that feeds on itself. Investors and clients start withdrawing their money. A recession, or even a depression, can follow.

These consequences are the reason that government officials bail out banks more frequently than other businesses. Bailouts, of course, have huge downsides: They typically use taxpayer money (or other banks’ money) to subsidize affluent bank executives who failed at their jobs. “Nobody is as privileged in the entire economy,” Anat Admati, a finance professor at Stanford University’s business school, told me.

During a crisis, bailouts can be unavoidable because of the economic risks from bank collapses. The key question, then, is how to regulate banks rigorously enough to minimize the number of necessary bailouts.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. has failed to do so. After the financial crisis of 2007-9, policymakers tightened the rules through the Dodd-Frank Act. But Congress and the Trump administration loosened oversight for midsize banks in 2018 — and Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were two of the firms that stood to benefit.

As complicated as finance can be, the basic principles behind bank regulation are straightforward. Banks require special scrutiny from the government because they may receive special benefits from taxpayers during a crisis. This scrutiny includes limits on the risks that banks can take and requirements that they keep enough money in reserve to survive most foreseeable crises. “You make sure they have enough to pay,” as Admati put it.

Bank executives and investors often bristle at such rules because they reduce returns. Money held in reserve, after all, cannot be invested elsewhere and earn big profits. It also can’t go poof when hard times arrive.

More on the economy

  • Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the Biden administration was prepared to take additional action to protect smaller banks.
  • On today’s episode of “The Daily,” Barney Frank, an architect of the banking rules, reflects on whether he contributed to the bank failures.
 

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Xi Jinping, China’s leader, with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. This photograph was released by Russian state media.Pool photo by Pavel Byrkin
 
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  • President Biden designated two national monuments in Nevada and Texas, protecting lands important to Native Americans.
  • “We were helpless”: Despair spread among C.D.C. workers during the pandemic under the Trump administration, a Times investigation uncovered.
  • Biden awarded medals to Walter Isaacson, Mindy Kaling, Gladys Knight, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ann Patchett, Bruce Springsteen, Bryan Stevenson, Amy Tan, Colson Whitehead and others. (During the ceremony, Biden made a re-election joke.)
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

The U.S. is no longer the indispensable nation for negotiating peace agreements. Good, Trita Parsi writes.

Rents are spiraling in New York. The state’s Legislature should support more suburban housing, says Mara Gay.

 
 

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Westchester, Los Angeles.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times

Plane spotting: In Los Angeles, where life can feel cinematic, people gather to watch the skies.

Violent crash: Gwyneth Paltrow is on trial for her role in a ski accident.

Jam or cream: A decade-long quest of love, loss and scones.

Advice from Wirecutter: Get a mug warmer and slippers for people who are always cold.

Lives Lived: Willis Reed brought a resolute physicality to his 10-year career as a center for the Knicks, and his willingness to play hurt created an enduring basketball moment. Reed died at 80.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

World Baseball Classic: Japan beat the United States, 3-2. Shohei Ohtani took the mound in the ninth inning and struck out Mike Trout, his Angels teammate. See the final moment.

“Not completely better”: Ja Morant, the Memphis Grizzlies star, said he’s still uncomfortable about his return to basketball after seeking mental health treatment. His coach says he should play tonight.

March Madness: The women’s Sweet 16 is down two No. 1 seeds. It’s a sign of parity among teams, Sabreena Merchant writes.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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The actors playing Arthur, Lancelot and Guenevere.Jingyu Lin for The New York Times

Return to ‘Camelot’

The musical “Camelot” debuted in 1960, during a golden age for Broadway shows, but it was never as big as “The Sound of Music” or “West Side Story.” A revival, starting next month, tapped Aaron Sorkin to overhaul what critics agreed was the show’s weakness: its script.

Sorkin’s penchant for witty, fast-paced dialogue has created anticipation among theater fans. One of his big changes: no supernatural elements. “This story, in particular, had a chance of landing more powerfully, more emotionally, if people felt real,” Sorkin said.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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David Malosh for The New York Times

Ramadan begins tonight in the U.S. For many it wouldn’t be complete without qatayef asafiri, sweet stuffed pancakes drizzled with syrup.

 
What to Read

Jinwoo Chong’s debut novel, “Flux,” is a brain-bending pleasure.

 
Busted Bracket?

Our new N.C.A.A. prediction game requires no brackets.

 
Late Night

The hosts joked about Trump’s potential indictment.

 
Now Time to Play
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The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were conveyed and convoyed. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Lover of Juliet (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

P.S. Sign up to receive twice-weekly pop playlists from Lindsay Zoladz, a Times critic.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 23, 2023

 

Members of Congress will question TikTok’s chief executive at a hearing this morning. My colleague Lauren Jackson explains the stakes in today’s newsletter. — David Leonhardt

Good morning. U.S. officials say TikTok is a national security risk. They’re trying to turn it into their advantage.

 
 
 
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Ritchie B Tongo/EPA, via Shutterstock

An American edge

The platforms are so powerful, their names are verbs: Google, Uber, Instagram, Netflix.

For years, the dominance of American tech companies has brought economic benefits to the United States. It has also offered an advantage in a less obvious area — national security.

Tech companies gather incredible amounts of data about their users. They know where we travel, who our friends are and what we watch. Governments want to use this data for surveillance, law enforcement and espionage. So they hack, hoard, steal and buy it. For years, the U.S. has had an edge over other countries. With court approval, the government can demand that social media giants, based in the U.S. and subject to U.S. law, hand over data about users.

“We had this advantage that we thought would just go on forever,” Bruce Schneier, a security expert and Harvard fellow, said.

Then TikTok came along. The social media app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has more than a billion users. TikTok says that includes about 150 million Americans. Under China’s authoritarian state, the government has sweeping control over tech companies and their data. U.S. officials are worried that China will use TikTok to promote its interests and gather Americans’ personal information. One Republican called it a “spy balloon in your phone.”

TikTok is the latest flashpoint in the two countries’ struggle for supremacy. Last week, TikTok said U.S. officials had given its Chinese ownership two options: Sell the app or risk a nationwide ban. This morning, lawmakers will question TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, about the app’s ties to China.

Today, I will explain the fight over TikTok and how the U.S. is trying to use the app to its advantage.

The concerns

This fight is ostensibly about data: who controls it and determines how it appears on TikTok. The U.S. has two main reasons for concern.

First is the threat of Chinese espionage. BuzzFeed found that ByteDance engineers in China had accessed American users’ private data. ByteDance also admitted that employees, including two based in China, spied on journalists and obtained their IP addresses, but said that company leaders had not signed off and that the employees were fired. Despite ByteDance’s close ties to China, TikTok has denied that it has given data to the government.

Second, ByteDance could use TikTok’s algorithms to influence Americans. TikTok has been accused of censoring videos about politically sensitive subjects for China, like Tibetan independence and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

A Chinese company owns what has become America’s number one culture maker right now,” Sapna Maheshwari, a Times reporter who covers TikTok, said. In the future, lawmakers say, it’s easy to imagine how China could use TikTok to shape American attitudes about Taiwan — or an American presidential campaign.

The U.S. is escalating efforts to limit TikTok’s power. The federal government and more than half of the states have banned TikTok from government devices and networks. Britain, Canada and Belgium have done the same. India banned the app entirely. Now the U.S. is threatening a nationwide ban, too.

How likely is a ban?

Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, but judges rejected his attempt. The government is trying again, though it’s unclear exactly how a ban would be implemented. There is no precedent for U.S. restrictions on an app this big.

One approach that some lawmakers prefer would remove TikTok from Apple’s and Google’s app stores and make the app nonfunctional on U.S. cellphone networks. But the government couldn’t reach into users’ phones to delete the app. TikTok would still be accessible to those who already have it, though users couldn’t download updates to the app, which would probably render it unusable eventually.

Any ban faces legal and political hurdles, including questions about First Amendment protections and the possibility of angering millions of TikTok users heading into a presidential election year.

The U.S. may be threatening a ban to force another outcome in its favor — the sale of TikTok to an American company. TikTok and the U.S. have previously negotiated about one. Still, the path is murky. China is unlikely to approve a sale. And if it did, it’s unclear who would buy the app, which could cost $50 billion, according to some analysts. A sale could also trigger antitrust concerns for probable suitors like Microsoft.

The power of a threat

Even if a ban never happens, the threat of one still matters. The Biden administration is using the specter of further restrictions to communicate a hard line on China. Lawmakers in both parties will likely make that point clear in the hearing today.

The episode is the latest in the larger fight between two world powers competing for dominance. In this contest, data is a valuable source of economic and political clout.

“If you can control data, you can have influence,” Joseph Nye, a political scientist, said.

China has known this for years. The country has banned apps like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and operated a tightly controlled internet, isolating its citizens from the rest of the world. The U.S. is now threatening to use China’s playbook against it, effectively using private companies as a national asset and limiting information access as a form of sanctioning.

Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, is expected to tell Congress today that the app is a vehicle for promoting soft power — a “lens through which the rest of the world can experience American culture.” But the U.S. has made clear it cares more about the hard power of data.

“TikTok is the first platform to truly compete with these huge American tech companies,” Sapna said. “The signal the government is sending is: Don’t bother.”

For more

 

THE LATEST NEWS

The Economy
  • The Fed raised interest rates by a quarter of a point, a middle ground that officials hope will temper inflation without further harming banks.
  • The banking turmoil could also help slow the rise in prices as banks lend less money, the Fed’s chairman, Jerome Powell, said.
  • Stocks rose on the news of the rate hike, but fell later in the day as investors fretted about banking.
 
Politics
  • The Manhattan grand jury investigating Donald Trump did not meet yesterday, pushing back its decision on whether to indict him.
  • In a separate case, about government documents at Mar-a-Lago, an appeals court ordered Trump’s lawyer to turn over records.
  • Michigan Democrats passed a bill to repeal a law that weakened unions. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is expected to sign it.
  • Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming, at least temporarily, after a judge blocked the state’s abortion ban until further court proceedings.
  • While residents of Jackson, Miss., boiled their water during a shortage, the city squandered five million gallons a day from a single broken pipe.
 
International
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A hot spring in Fukushima Prefecture.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
 
Other Big Stories
  • Surveillance video shows police officers in Virginia punching a man in a jail cell until he went limp hours before he died in a psychiatric hospital.
  • A high-school student in Denver shot two school administrators and fled. The authorities said they had found the suspect’s car and a body nearby.
  • Parents struggling financially in Los Angeles say they understand why school workers are striking.
 
Opinions

Teaching the conservative intellectual tradition challenges liberal college students — and gives conservative ones something to aspire to, says Jon Shields.

To avert the next financial crisis, give a representative of the American people a voice on banks’ boards, says Saule Omarova.

 
 

Sale ends soon: All of The Times. $1 a week.

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MORNING READS

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Morning mists in the Gomati Basin.Michael Benanav

Sky-scraping summits: A writer, guided by an epic folk tale, tours the Himalayas.

Beethoven’s death: People thought he was poisoned. A lock of hair debunked that myth.

90-year-old tortoise: Mr. Pickles is a new dad of three.

Advice from Wirecutter: Cheap but lovely additions to your porch.

Lives Lived: In the early 1960s, scientists didn’t fully understand how marijuana got people high. The Israeli chemist Raphael Mechoulam sought to find out, earning the unofficial title “the father of cannabis research.” Mechoulam died at 92.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

A hit: The World Baseball Classic championship game was the tournament’s most-watched game ever in the U.S.

One more year: North Carolina’s Armando Bacot will return to school for a fifth season of basketball.

Cancer diagnosis: Free-agent N.F.L. tight end Foster Moreau has Hodgkin’s lymphoma that was discovered during a routine physical conducted by the New Orleans Saints’ medical team.

 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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Netflix; Scholastic, via Graphix

From book to screen

Alice Oseman’s webcomic “Heartstopper” has grown into a sensation, first as a graphic novel series with three million copies in print and then as a live-action Netflix series. Along the way, Oseman has been intent on staying true to her original creation.

“It was really important to us in our vision to preserve the aesthetic of the comics and the tone of the comics,” Oseman told The Times. Using frames from the comic and clips from the show, she explained how she adapted three key scenes.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Bobbi Lin for The New York Times

It’s radicchio season. Use it in this Caesar salad.

 
Theater

“Shucked” brings country music, and corny puns, to Broadway.

 
What’s on TV

“They’re Watching Us,” a documentary by Vice News, investigates the conflicts between student safety and privacy.

 
Late Night

The hosts are still awaiting Donald Trump’s potential perp walk.

 
Now Time to Play
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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was fidgety. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Scale, as a rock wall (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. One of the Liberty cargo ships the U.S. lent to Britain during World War II was named for Adolph S. Ochs, The Times’s former publisher.

The Daily” is about American cinema.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 24, 2023

 

Good morning. A federal judge spoke at Stanford Law School. Chaos ensued.

 
 
 
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Stanford University.Ben Margot/Associated Press

A heckler’s veto

Stuart Kyle Duncan — a federal appeals court judge appointed by Donald Trump — visited Stanford Law School this month to give a talk. It didn’t go well.

Students frequently interrupted him with heckling. One protester called for his daughters to be raped, Duncan said. When he asked Stanford administrators to calm the crowd, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion walked to the lectern and instead began her remarks by criticizing him. “For many people here, your work has caused harm,” she told him.

After Duncan described his experience in a Wall Street Journal essay last week, the episode has received national attention and caused continuing turmoil at Stanford. The associate dean has been placed on leave. Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and its law school dean, Jenny Martinez, have apologized to Duncan. Students responded to the apology with a protest during Martinez’s class on constitutional law. On Wednesday, Martinez wrote a 10-page public memo criticizing students’ behavior at the judge’s talk and announcing a mandatory half-day session on freedom of speech for all law students.

The conflict is a microcosm of today’s political polarization. Duncan is a pugnacious conservative who opposed the right to same-sex marriage before becoming a judge. During his five years on the bench he has issued rulings restricting abortion, blocking Covid vaccine mandates and refusing to refer to a prisoner by her preferred pronoun. His critics see him as a bully who denies basic rights to vulnerable people. His defenders call him a good conservative judge (and emphasize that the prisoner in the pronoun dispute was convicted of child pornography).

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Stuart Kyle Duncan in 2019.Samuel Corum for The New York Times

But even many people who disagree with Duncan’s views have been bothered by the Stanford students’ behavior. And it seems possible that the episode may affect the larger debate over free speech on campuses.

Dignity and curiosity

Over the past few years, some American universities have seemed to back away from their historical support for free speech. Hamline University in Minnesota effectively fired a teacher who showed a 14th-century painting of the Prophet Muhammad in an art history class. A Princeton student lost her leadership position on a sports team after privately expressing an opinion about policing. Stanford itself allows students to file anonymous complaints against other students, including for speech.

Now, though, Stanford seems to be drawing a line in defense of free speech. “The First Amendment does not give protesters a ‘heckler’s veto,’” Martinez, the law dean, wrote in her memo. Stanford, she vowed, will not become “an echo chamber that ill prepares students to go out into and act as effective advocates in a society that disagrees about many important issues.”

Martinez also wrote: “The cycle of degenerating discourse won’t stop if we insist that people we disagree with must first behave the way we want them to … The cycle stops when we recognize our responsibility to treat each other with the dignity with which we expect to be met. It stops when we choose to replace condemnation with curiosity, invective with inquiry.”

The latest: Tirien Steinbach — the associate dean who rose to speak during the event and is now on leave — published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal yesterday explaining her position. She said that she was trying to de-escalate the situation and noted that she defended Duncan’s right to speak during her remarks. “While free speech isn’t easy or comfortable, it’s necessary for democracy,” Steinbach wrote.

Below, my colleague Ian Prasad Philbrick has compiled a selection of commentary on the episode.

Commentary

David French, in Times Opinion: “It is entirely appropriate to ask any judge difficult questions during the question and answer session after a speech. But protests that go so far as to shout down or disrupt speeches or events aren’t free speech but rather mob censorship.”

Elie Mystal of The Nation defended the students: “Everybody has the right to speak; nobody has the right to be heard over the din of the crowd.” Mystal also criticized Duncan for insulting the students during the event. (Duncan said to one, “You are an appalling idiot.”)

Steven Lubet of Northwestern University’s law school, in The Hill: “The judge, the student protesters and an on-scene administrator all played to type, exhibiting arrogance, intolerance and irresponsibility, respectively, that combined to make the afternoon a fiasco for all concerned.”

David Lat, Substack: “In hindsight, would it have been better if Judge Duncan had not lashed out at the protesters? Yes … [But] I’m not going to sit here and judge the judge for not acting more judicially in response to verbal abuse.”

Ed Whelan, a conservative legal activist, has criticized Martinez for not punishing any of the students. (In her memo, she explained that it would be difficult to determine who deserved punishment and suggested that the associate dean’s implicit support for the heckling made it difficult for the school to sanction students afterward.)

David Bernstein of George Mason University called Martinez’s memo passionate and excellent but criticized Stanford for having only one known conservative among its law professors: “Intentionally or not, the Stanford faculty is sending its students the message that right-of-center views are not respectable, and not worth listening to.”

 

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THE LATEST NEWS

TikTok Hearing
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TikTok CEO Shou Chew on Capitol Hill.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
  • For five tense hours, Lawmakers grilled TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, about the app’s ties to China and its effects on children for five tense hours.
  • Chew tried to play down TikTok’s links to its Chinese owner, ByteDance, emphasizing a plan to store U.S. users’ data on American soil. Lawmakers in both parties seemed unswayed.
  • The Chinese government made Chew’s efforts more difficult when it announced before the hearing that it would oppose a forced sale of TikTok.
  • Utah’s governor signed a bill intended to keep minors off TikTok and Instagram by barring them from accounts without parental consent.
 
Politics
 
International
  • A drone of Iranian origin killed a U.S. contractor in Syria, according to the Pentagon, which ordered airstrikes in Syria in response.
  • Israel’s Parliament made it harder to oust prime ministers. Benjamin Netanyahu then vowed to proceed with divisive efforts to overhaul the judiciary.
  • The Pentagon is struggling to supply Ukraine with weapons, exposing a worrisome lack of production capacity in the U.S.
  • Elián González, who once was the focus of an international custody fight, is expected to win a seat in Cuba’s legislature, The Miami Herald reports.
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, spoke with Times Opinion about his life among secrets.

We’re in a new Cold War with China, David Brooks says, that is putting industrial policy at the center of our politics.

 
 

Sale ends soon: All of The Times. $1 a week.

The All Access sale is on. Enjoy it all — News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, together in one subscription. Subscribe today for $1 a week for unlimited access to everything we offer. Prices may vary by location.

 

MORNING READS

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Dave Rasmussen is 7 feet 2 inches tall.Sara Stathas for The New York Times

Stop asking: Yes, they are very tall. No, they do not play basketball.

Nepo babies: A famous daughter was grounded for trying to charter a helicopter. She told TikTok all about it.

Forbidden graveyard: A million bodies are buried there. Soon, it will open to visitors.

Advice from Wirecutter: These are the best Easter egg dyeing kits.

Lives Lived: Fuzzy Haskins joined the Parliaments as a teenager. It later became Parliament-Funkadelic, one of the wildest vocal acts of the 1970s. He died at 81.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

Sweet 16: Kansas State beat Michigan State in an overtime thriller. And Gonzaga toppled UCLA in the last seconds. Watch the game-winning three from the half court logo.

A cheeky survival: The Eagles’ highly successful quarterback sneak tactic, dubbed “The Two-Cheek Sneak,” will remain legal this coming N.F.L. season.

Buying in: Tom Brady is the newest investor in the Las Vegas Aces, the defending W.N.B.A. champions.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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The New York Times

Political chatbots

As artificial intelligence gets more powerful, experts say users should be aware of the bots’ potential for ideological slant. Some examples: ChatGPT was willing to write an ode to Joe Biden, but not to Donald Trump, and a smaller bot, created by the company Brave, informs users that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. The Times explains how chatbots are becoming a new front in the culture war.

Learn more: Our colleagues Kevin Roose and Cade Metz are hosting a one-week crash course on A.I. Sign up for their newsletter.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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The New York Times

Shakshuka is the apex of eggs-for-dinner recipes. Try this one with feta.

 
Travel

Discover rum shops in Barbados.

 
News Quiz
 
Late Night

The hosts mocked the threat of TikTok spying.

 
Now Time to Play
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was flavorful. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Emotional states (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. The word “nonrambunctious” — referring to John Adams — appeared for the first time in The Times recently.

The Daily” is about climate change.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 25, 2023

 

Good morning. The last season of “Succession” premieres tomorrow. Let the weeping and gnashing of teeth commence.

 
 
 
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María Jesús Contreras

This is not for tears

What will we watch when it’s over?

This question has come up lately whenever I encounter a fellow fan of “Succession,” which begins its fourth and final season tomorrow. We confess to anticipatory grief, pre-missing the despicable, irresistible Roy family, only 10 episodes to go.

I wonder if this intensity of emotion isn’t only about our love of the show’s storytelling. The two years between the end of Season 2 (October 2019) and the beginning of Season 3 (October 2021) coincided roughly with the first two years of the pandemic, when we felt the absence of our pop-cultural security blankets acutely. The beginning of a new “Succession” season feels like an exhalation, a reprieve.

The show as “event,” as cultural phenomenon, a mixture of actual audience enthusiasm and marketing hype, is a curious thing. You can buckle up and go for the ride — marking premiere dates on your calendar, setting the DVR or planning a viewing party, dissecting each episode on group texts — or you can, thanks to iron will or just not caring about the show at hand, sit it out.

When you’ve opted out, the fuss seems amusing but trifling. I skipped the ongoing event that was “Game of Thrones” and was unmoved by the distant din of “can you believe this person vanquished/slept with/slayed that person/dragon?” that followed every episode. There was comfort in being indifferent, in conserving my curiosity and energy.

When you’re all in, it’s a different story. I’m basking now in the electricity that crackles between me and a fellow “Succession” enthusiast when we discuss our predictions for the new season. I love reminding people that the premiere is this weekend and hearing their sighs of relief, of “Finally!” I’m a completist, hoovering up all the profiles and behind-the-scenes gossip and podcast interviews. (I recommend this video of the 10 things the actor Jeremy Strong can’t live without from GQ and Hunter Harris’s on-location dispatch from Tuscany before last season, from New York Magazine.)

Of course there will be other good shows to watch. (“Couples Therapy,” a very good show that’s not what you think if you think it must be cheesy or tawdry as I did before getting totally engrossed, returns on April 28.) Even if many of the offerings on hand seem like thin broth compared with the nutrient-dense stew of “Succession,” we’ll find something else to feast on before long. Mourning a show’s imminent end is a bittersweet element of being a fan, as nourishing as preseason excitement and post-episode rehashing.

And if the prospect of saying goodbye forever seems too painful, there’s always this. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong kept hope alive: “I have caveated the end of the show, when I’ve talked to some of my collaborators, like: Maybe there’s another part of this world we could come back to, if there was an appetite?” he said. “Maybe there’s something else that could be done, that harnessed what’s been good about the way we’ve worked on this.” A spinoff? A reunion? A one-off holiday special some day in the future? A fan can dream.

For more

  • Catch up with a Season 3 finale recap.
  • “It’s a weird thing, the grief when you finish a job. It’s sort of awful and heartbreaking, but at the same time, there’s a slight relief — a complicated mélange of feelings.” Sarah Lyall spoke with Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Tom Wambsgans.
  • “They’re both interested in substance, and neither of them needs to be the center of attention in a room, and nobody is smarter than either of them in a room.” J. Smith-Cameron’s husband, the writer and director Kenneth Lonergan, on what his wife has in common with her character, Gerri Kellman.
  • From 2021, how Nicholas Braun elevates Cousin Greg.
 
 

All of The Times for $1 a week. Ends soon.

All Access has it all — News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, together. And for a limited time, this exceptional subscription is on sale. Subscribe today at a special rate, and enjoy unlimited access to everything we offer. Prices may vary by location.

 

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THE WEEK IN CULTURE

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The TikTok creator Janette Ok in Washington.Shuran Huang for The New York Times
 

THE LATEST NEWS

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Rahul Gandhi.Adnan Abidi/Reuters
  • Allies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India expelled a top rival, Rahul Gandhi, from Parliament. Many see it as a consolidation of Mr. Modi’s power.
  • At least three people were killed when a large tornado ripped through rural Mississippi on Friday night, the authorities said.
  • The Los Angeles school district and its workers reached a tentative deal after a three-day strike this week.
  • Iran-backed militias launched attacks against U.S.-led coalition military bases in Syria, escalating the conflict there.
  • French citizens who oppose the increase in the retirement age hold nightly protests marked by vandalism, and say it is the only way to make their voices heard.
  • Donald Trump will hold a rally today in Waco, Texas, where a fiery federal raid on a doomsday sect 30 years ago turned the city into a symbol of government overreach for the far right.
  • Paul Rusesabagina, whose role in fighting genocide was said to inspire the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” was released from prison.
 

CULTURE CALENDAR

📺 “Yellowjackets” (Sunday): The first season of this series — which jumped back and forth in time between a team of female high school soccer players whose plane crash lands in the Canadian wilderness and their traumatized, present-day selves — was a minor sensation. That was partly for its stellar cast (Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci, among others), partly for its ’90s nostalgia-on-overdrive soundtrack and partly because it was creepy as hell. Season 2 starts this weekend on Showtime.

📚 “Crying in H Mart” (Tuesday): Michelle Zauner, the lead singer of the band Japanese Breakfast, is now probably as well known for this critically acclaimed memoir, out in paperback after two years riding the best-seller list, as she is for her music. As David Marchese wrote, “H Mart” is “about food and memory, the confusion that can come with biracial identity, Zauner’s fraught relationship with her hyper-demanding Korean mother and then her grief at losing her mother to cancer.”

 

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RECIPE OF THE WEEK

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Andrew Purcell for The New York Times

Spring Minestrone With Kale and Pasta

There’s no better way to conjure spring at mealtime than by piling green things on your plate — or with this soup, in a pot. This is the moment each year in which I go wild with asparagus, kale, peas, dill — anything that banishes the blasé gray of a New York winter. Kay Chun’s fast spring soup does this brilliantly, with the thrilling addition of fresh ginger.

 

REAL ESTATE

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Jayna Roy designed a mushroom-themed nursery for her daughter.Halkin Mason for The New York Times

Interior design: Mushrooms are becoming a sought-after motif in decorating.

Warming planet: More Americans are uprooting their lives for safer climates.

What you get for $250,000: A Craftsman bungalow in Kaukauna, Wis.; a rowhouse in Philadelphia; or a midcentury ranch house in Florence, Ala.

Cost calculator: Where is it cheaper to build than to buy?

The hunt: A couple wanted to swap their home in Pennsylvania for a California rental. Which one did they choose? Play our game.

 

LIVING

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A Sunday morning swim in Bergen, Norway.David B. Torch for The New York Times

Borealis festival: Listen to live music in a pool by a fjord in Norway.

Hotel stays: Daily room cleaning is on the way out.

Heart-to-bot: Trying to have a tough conversation? Consult Chat GPT.

Night anxiety: Give yourself a caffeine cutoff to avoid racing thoughts.

Luxury gyms: Where exercise requires an approval process, and monthly fees of up to $2,750.

 

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Sanity from storage containers

It’s prime spring cleaning season, which can be as daunting as it is inspiring. I recently finished some house projects, and my garage looked as if a tornado had swept through it. The solution was simple storage containers. In Wirecutter’s guide, our experts tossed 32 bins down stairs, left them to soak in rain and stuffed them full to find the best ones. I used a mix of the Iris Weathertight Totes and HDX Tough Storage Totes, but our guide includes additional options to manage your mess. — Daniela Gorny

For step-by-step advice on how to keep everything in your home squeaky clean, sign up for Wirecutter’s Clean Everything newsletter.

 

GAME OF THE WEEKEND

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San Diego State upset Alabama to advance to the Elite Eight.Jordan Prather/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

March Madness: By Monday evening, both the men’s and women’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments will be down to their final four teams. The UConn women’s team, which had struggled this season with injuries, is back at full strength and looks capable of winning it all; UConn plays Ohio State today (4 p.m. Eastern on ABC). On the men’s side, Florida Atlantic, a small school in Boca Raton that had never won a tournament game before this year, plays Kansas State tonight for a spot in the semifinals (6 p.m. on TBS).

The latest

  • Alabama and Houston, the last remaining No. 1 seeds in the men’s bracket, each lost last night. For the first time since 1979, no top seeds have reached the Elite Eight.
  • It’s a March to remember for Miami: Both its men’s and women’s teams are in the Elite Eight, after the men upset Houston and the women upset Villanova.
 

NOW TIME TO PLAY

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was mythology. Here is today’s puzzle.

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

Here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 26, 2023

 

Good morning. Times journalists visited an ancient city in Turkey to document the historic landmarks lost in last month’s earthquakes.

 
 
 
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Part of the Old City district in Antakya, Turkey.The New York Times

A vanished city

Times graphics reporters Anjali Singhvi and Bedel Saget recently traveled to Antakya, a Turkish city badly damaged by February’s earthquakes. Based on their reporting, they published an article this week that walks through the damage in Antakya’s Old City, a commercial and religious hub.

The initial quakes were several weeks ago, but the damage continues to dominate life in much of Turkey and Syria. I spoke with Anjali and Bedel about what they saw in Antakya.

Ashley: What surprised you about Antakya’s destruction?

Bedel: I had in my mind what the destruction would look like, but when you’re driving around and seeing residential building after residential building flattened, it stops you in your tracks. We saw a building split in half — half had collapsed and half was still standing — and we could see an entire dining room set still present on the third floor, as though it were a dollhouse.

Anjali: We also saw so many photographs of missing people placed right outside the damaged buildings. I had assumed they were part of residents’ belongings in that building, but a local journalist told me that families left photos of their loved ones around the site of the rubble so that if someone clears debris or continues the search, those photos might help identify bodies.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Much of Old City was destroyed.Emily Garthwaite for The New York Times

Times graphics reporters often use satellite imagery to reconstruct disaster sites. Why was actually being in Antakya important for this project?

Anjali: Before the trip, I had identified some areas from drone imagery of Antakya that seemed most damaged, and speculated that those areas could be good to cover. But when I was reporting on the ground, all the locals talked about an area I hadn’t considered: Old City, a historic part of Antakya.

Old City was home to so many different kinds of buildings — churches, mosques, a synagogue, restored boutique hotels, jewelry shops, silk stores, a local favorite hummus shop, just real gems. Amid the rubble, we saw government officials putting up signs on various buildings in Old City, labeling them as important cultural assets and warning people not to tamper anymore with the debris. From being there, I saw how Antakya had history in its soil, its buildings and its people. And it was Old City that really brought the community together.

Did you get the sense that residents wanted to stay as Antakya rebuilds?

Bedel: Quite a number of people left if they had the means to: Either they had family in other parts of Turkey or if they had homes elsewhere. But among those who stayed, everyone we spoke to talked about the commitment to rebuild, no matter what.

The things that made Old City a gathering spot — the atmosphere, the aura, the embrace of different cultures — I could feel that’s what they longed for most. I spoke to a young woman, who recently graduated from medical school, who said, “It was good before, but we didn’t understand before we lost our city, how important it was to us.”

See what was lost in Antakya’s Old City, through one street at the heart of the community.

Anjali is a reporter and a former architect whose work at The Times includes reconstructing building disasters, such as a Bronx apartment fire and Miami’s Surfside condo collapse. Bedel joined The Times in 1991, and has covered hurricanes, wildfires and nine Olympic Games.

 

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NEWS

Southern Tornadoes
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Rolling Fork, Miss.Rory Doyle for The New York Times
 
International
 
Other Big Stories
 

FROM OPINION

 
 

The Sunday question: Should the U.S. ban TikTok?

TikTok’s propaganda and privacy risks justify a ban if its Chinese owners won’t sell it, says Bloomberg Opinion’s Julianna Goldman. The evidence that the app threatens U.S. national security is largely anecdotal, Vox’s Sara Morrison counters; banning it would hurt free speech and repel young voters.

 
 

All of The Times for $1 a week. Ends soon.

All Access has it all — News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, together. And for a limited time, this exceptional subscription is on sale. Subscribe today at a special rate, and enjoy unlimited access to everything we offer. Prices may vary by location.

 

MORNING READS

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A jacaranda tree in Mexico.Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times

Jacarandas in Mexico City: They are a living legacy of a Japanese gardener.

Caitlin Clark: Look at the college basketball player’s threes from the half-court logo.

Occult practice: Archaeologists found iron nails used as talismans in a Roman tomb.

Vows: He never thought he would have a meaningful relationship — until a summer vacation in Turkey.

Sunday routine: A musical saw player is a bell ringer for her church.

Advice from Wirecutter: Treat back pain at home.

Lives lived: Gordon E. Moore was the co-founder of Intel, the California chip maker. His predictions about advances in semiconductors ushered in an era of American tech dominance. He died at 94.

 

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BOOKS

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Yosemite’s “Three Brothers,” taken in 1865.Carleton E.Watkins, via Library of Congress

“Guardians of the Valley”: Dean King chronicles the friendship between the naturalist John Muir and a journalist.

Censorship: Efforts to ban books nearly doubled last year.

By the Book: The horror novelist Victor LaValle likes to stare directly at his deepest fears.

Our editors’ picks: “Poverty, by America,” which looks at the persistence of extreme want in a nation of extraordinary wealth, and eight other books.

Times best sellers: Harlan Coben’s “I Will Find You” takes the top spot on the hardcover fiction best-seller list.

 

THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

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Photograph by Naila Ruechel for The New York Times.

On the cover: A journey through the mythic landscape of Jamaica that tourists don’t see.

Three-day food fight: People in an Italian town pelt one another with 900 tons of oranges.

Package trip: Millennials are paying for organized travel to make friends.

 

THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For
  • T‌he chief executives of Apple, BMW and other major companies are expected in Beijing this weekend for the China Development Forum, an annual conference on foreign investment.
  • Two weeks after Daylight Saving Time began in the U.S., clocks went forward an hour today in Britain and the European Union.
  • The Hungarian Parliament, one of the last holdouts in ratifying Finland’s bid to join NATO, will hold a vote on it tomorrow.
  • House lawmakers will hold a hearing on Wednesday on regulators’ response to the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
  • The deadline for U.S. federal agencies to remove TikTok from government devices is Wednesday.
  • The Biden administration invited dozens of countries for a summit on democracy beginning Wednesday and co-hosted by several nations.
  • Major League Baseball’s season begins on Thursday.
  • The N.C.A.A. women’s basketball Final Four begins on Friday, and the men’s on Saturday.
  • Saturday is April Fool’s Day.
 
What to Cook This Week
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Linda Xiao for The New York Times Food Stylist: Judy Kim.

The recipes in this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, by Emily Weinstein, are meant to help you clean out your fridge. Chicken fried rice is a great vehicle for leftover chicken. Sheet-pan bibimbap will help you use up the stray vegetables in the crisper. And Melissa Clark’s all-purpose green sauce incorporates whatever herbs you have and can go on meat or veggies.

 

NOW TIME TO PLAY

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangram‌‌ from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was‌ motorway. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: “Great job!” (five letters).

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.

Here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 27, 2023

 

Good morning. As Republicans prepare for a fight over the debt ceiling, they have a political problem: which government programs to cut.

 
 
 
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
U.S. Capitol in Washington.Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

Grand Old Programs

As congressional Republicans prepare for a budget showdown later this year with President Biden, they say that they will insist on large cuts to federal spending. So far, though, they have left out some pretty important details: what those cuts might be.

Republicans have been more willing to talk about what they won’t cut. Party leaders have promised not to touch Medicare and Social Security. Republicans generally oppose reductions in military spending and veterans’ benefits. And neither party can do anything about interest payments on the debt that the government has already accumulated. Combined, these categories make up almost two-thirds of federal government spending.

The largest remaining category involves health care spending that benefits lower- and middle-income families, including from Medicaid and Obamacare. Hard-right Republicans, like some in the Freedom Caucus, have signaled they will propose reductions to these programs. Party leaders, for their part, have said they would eye cuts to anti-poverty programs such as food stamps.

But cuts like these would have a big potential downside for Republicans: The partisan shifts of recent years mean that Republican voters now benefit from these redistributive programs even more than Democratic voters do.

As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein recently wrote, “The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the G.O.P. wants to cut.”

Almost 70 percent of House Republicans represent districts where the median income is lower than the national median, according to researchers at the University of Southern California. By contrast, about 60 percent of House Democrats represent districts more affluent than the median.

The politics of class, as Brownstein puts it, have been inverted.

Upside down

I’ve written before about the tensions that this inversion has created for Democrats. The party increasingly reflects the views of upper-income professionals who tend to be more liberal on social issues than most swing voters. Today’s left is less religious and patriotic than the country as a whole and less concerned about crime and border security. The left is more focused on differences among Americans, especially by race, gender and sexuality, than on what Americans have in common.

This shift has been happening for a long time, but it has accelerated in the past decade. “The new left is very conscious of identity,” my colleague Nate Cohn wrote last week. “Obama-era liberals tended to emphasize the commonalities between groups and downplayed longstanding racial, religious and partisan divisions.” (In that article, Nate make a thoughtful attempt to define “woke.”)

These developments have created challenges for the Democratic Party. It has continued to lose working-class white voters and recently lost some Latino and Asian American voters. Biden and his aides spend considerable time thinking about these problems, and he has tried to take a less elitist approach. Democrats don’t “pay nearly as much attention to working-class folks as we used to,” he has said.

But the new class dynamic also creates challenges for the Republican Party. For decades, it was the party that skewed affluent. It still had to manage the differences between its higher-income voters and its evangelical voters, but Republicans were mostly comfortable pushing for lower taxes and smaller government (other than the military). Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, embodied this outlook.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Paul Ryan and Donald Trump in 2018.Erin Schaff for The New York Times

Donald Trump was able to engineer a hostile takeover of the party in 2016 partly because he recognized that many Republican voters had no interest in Ryan-style cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Trump promised to protect those programs and, unlike most Republican politicians, criticized trade deals. These positions helped him win the nomination and then the general election, as Matthew Yglesias of Substack has argued. In the 2024 Republican campaign, Trump is already using a similar strategy.

While Trump was president, however, he mostly did not govern as a populist. He acted more like a President Paul Ryan might have, cutting taxes on corporations and the affluent while trying to shrink Medicaid and repeal Obamacare. Those Trump policies weren’t popular. They contributed to the Republican Party’s huge losses in the 2018 midterms and probably hurt Trump’s re-election campaign too.

Polls show that even many Republican voters oppose cuts to government health care programs. The same message is evident in the outcome of state-level ballot initiatives: Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah have all voted to expand Medicaid.

The G.O.P. dilemma

The Republican Party has not yet figured out a solution to this problem. If the party were guided solely by public opinion, it might put together an agenda that was well to the right of the Democratic Party on social issues while also calling for higher taxes on the rich. “There is quite a bit of economically populist appetite even among Republicans for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations,” Bryan Bennett, who oversees polling at the Hub Project, a progressive group, told The Atlantic.

But the Republican Party retains enough of its wealthy base that it remains staunchly opposed to tax increases. Instead, Republicans say that the solution to the budget deficit involves less spending. But the specific cuts that they have talked about so far — like calls to reduce Medicaid and food stamps — don’t come close to balancing the budget. Other Republicans have talked about reducing the “woke bureaucracy,” but it is not clear what that would entail.

“The math doesn’t actually work,” my colleague Catie Edmondson, who covers Congress, said. “This is such a dilemma for Republicans.”

Adding to the challenge for Kevin McCarthy, the speaker, is the slim Republican House majority. McCarthy can lose only four votes and still pass a bill without Democratic support. “It is very hard to envision a Republican budget that can satisfy the Freedom Caucus and still get votes from Republicans in swing districts,” Carl Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, told me.

What’s next: Sometime this summer or fall, the U.S. government is likely to reach its debt limit. To avoid defaulting on debt payments — and risking a financial crisis — Congress will need to raise the limit before then, and Republicans say they will insist on cuts as part of a deal.

Related: Biden and McCarthy are on a collision course.

 

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THE LATEST NEWS

Turmoil in Israel
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Protesters blocking a highway in Tel Aviv yesterday.Omri Kedem/EPA, via Shutterstock
  • Protests flared up overnight in Israel and are continuing today after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister for opposing a plan that would strip power from the supreme court.
  • Unions are threatening to paralyze the economy. Medical strikes are underway and workers shut down outgoing flights at the main airport.
  • Netanyahu’s coalition appeared divided on how to respond, with hard-liners resisting suggestions of delaying the overhaul.
  • Here’s The Morning’s explainer on the turmoil.
 
Politics
 
Other Big Stories
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Recovery efforts in Rolling Fork, Miss., yesterday.Rory Doyle for The New York Times
 
Opinions

Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss crime, Trump and TikTok.

How to choose a college? This tool — by Quoctrung Bui and Jessia Malets you build your own rankings.

To solve a labor shortage, we need higher wages, safer workplaces and better jobs. We do not need more child labor, Terri Gerstein writes.

 
 

All of The Times for $1 a week. Ends soon.

All Access has it all — News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, together. And for a limited time, this exceptional subscription is on sale. Subscribe today at a special rate, and enjoy unlimited access to everything we offer. Prices may vary by location.

 

MORNING READS

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The production line at FutureStich.John Francis Peters for The New York Times

Made in America: It’s a lucrative pitch.

Sticker shock: These pants are $20,000 and secondhand.

Quiz time: Take our latest news quiz and share your score (the average was 8.4).

Advice from Wirecutter: The best umbrella.

Lives Lived: In works like “John Somebody,” the composer and guitarist Scott Johnson mixed the rigor of classical composition with the sound and attitude of rock. He died at 70.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

The men’s Final Four is set: UConn, Florida Atlantic, San Diego State and Miami had a collective 1-in-125,000 chance to make it this far. The Huskies have the best odds to win the title — for now.

March Madness history: Caitlin Clark became the only player to record a 40-point triple double in the N.C.A.A. Tournament. Her performance sent Iowa to the Final Four.

A return: LeBron James came off the bench in the Lakers’ loss yesterday, his first action since Feb. 26.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Resident Evil 4.Capcom

The art of the remake

When video game developers remake games, they have to appeal to both new players and those hoping to relive a favorite. For horror games, there’s an added challenge: Can you scare someone twice?

In a new version of the 2005 classic Resident Evil 4, developers made the zombie enemies faster and smarter and added elements to surprise even those who had memorized the original. The goal, said Yasuhiro Ampo, the game’s director, was “to create that same feeling from when people played these games for the first time.”

Review: “Newcomers have a chance to understand what the fuss was all about, and the rest of us jump in a time machine,” Patrick Klepek writes at Vice.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

These North African meatballs go well with couscous.

 
What to Read

“Grey Bees,” by the Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov, recently won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

 
Television Recap

The Roy family is back for a final season of “Succession,” and everyone came out swinging. (This article contains spoilers.)

 
Now Time to Play
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was typeface. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: “Cool!” (four letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. Read a Q. and A. with Bill Keller, The Times’s former executive editor, about his new book on America’s prison system.

The Daily” is about kids and social media.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
Link to comment
Share on other sites

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mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 28, 2023

 

Good morning. Israel’s protests succeeded by uniting some of the country’s most influential institutions.

 
 
 
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Demonstrators in Jerusalem yesterday.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

Deep divisions

Much of life in Israel came to a halt yesterday: Hospitals stopped providing nonemergency care, planes were grounded at the country’s main airport, and malls and banks closed. The disruptions were part of an escalation in protests against the government’s proposed judicial overhaul, which has plunged Israel into one of its gravest political crises ever.

The interruptions to daily life were the latest sign that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had underestimated Israelis’ opposition to his government’s proposed changes to the courts. In response to the chaos, he has relented, at least in part. Netanyahu announced yesterday that he would delay the changes until later this year. “When there is a possibility of preventing a civil war through dialogue, I, as the prime minister, take a timeout for dialogue,” he said.

The announcement calmed some of the protesters and unions have called off their strikes. But it remains unclear what will happen in the coming weeks — and whether Netanyahu will continue pushing a proposal that has started to fracture even his own cabinet. Israel has dealt with deep political divisions for some time — holding five elections in four years — and the fight over the judicial overhaul has shown that those divisions persist.

Over the last two days, the opposition used all of its power to threaten to shut down the economy unless its views were taken into account, while the other side threatened to use its majority in Parliament to push through their political agenda, Patrick Kingsley, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, explained.

“It was a very high-stakes game of chicken,” Patrick says.

But there’s still disappointment and uncertainty on both sides. “The opposition fears that this overhaul may simply be reinstated in its current form at a later date,” Patrick says. Among right-wing voters, Patrick says, there’s a feeling that their votes don’t count.

Today’s newsletter will focus on the opposition to the overhaul and why it has succeeded, for now, after weeks of protests.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Watching Netanyahu’s speech in Tel Aviv yesterday.Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

Powerful opposition

What prompted such large-scale chaos? In short, the extreme change that many Israelis feared the proposed judicial overhaul would bring. Like its American counterpart, Israel’s Supreme Court is very powerful. But with the overhaul, Israel’s Parliament could override the court’s decisions with a simple majority, giving the government sweeping power to enact its preferred policies.

Netanyahu and his allies argue that the overhaul is needed to limit the courts’ power. They believe the courts have become increasingly aggressive and have undermined voters’ choices over the past three decades. One example: The Supreme Court’s blocking of some settlements in the West Bank.

The opposition argues that the overhaul would significantly weaken one of the few checks, besides elections, on Parliament. Israelis in the opposition tend to hold a more secular, pluralistic vision for the country, and see the courts as important to preserving that view. The opposition also says that Netanyahu is pushing for the changes to protect himself because he is standing trial on corruption charges. Netanyahu denies that claim as well as the charges.

That opposition has gained momentum because it unites influential parts of Israeli society: universities, unions and the reservists who play a key role in the military. The backing of such organizations is often the difference between successful and failed protest movements, as my colleague Amanda Taub has explained. “Support from those institutions can be a way for protests to gain leverage over leaders, often by splitting up elite coalitions,” Amanda said.

That kind of split is already visible in Netanyahu’s cabinet. Over the weekend, the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, spoke out against the proposed overhaul, citing opposition from members of the military. “I see how the source of our strength is being eroded,” Gallant said.

Importantly, opposition from within the military goes beyond ideology. Soldiers and reservists argue that if the courts are too weak to provide a check on the military, officials may be more likely to give illegal orders and potentially expose soldiers to prosecution in international courts. “Those concrete concerns about self-interest may be far more difficult for the government to defuse than if the protests were just motivated by ideology and political solidarity,” Amanda wrote.

Netanyahu fired Gallant on Sunday. The dismissal prompted the latest protests in the country, which in turn compelled Netanyahu to pause his plans.

What’s next

Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul was made possible by a rightward shift in Israeli politics, as this newsletter has explained. His backtracking in the face of heavy opposition suggests that perhaps Israel’s population hasn’t moved as far to the right as he believes.

The overhaul’s delay has calmed the situation for now. But it could also lead to more political chaos: Netanyahu’s coalition holds a slim majority in Parliament, and it could collapse if his right-wing allies believe he is going back on his word. That could force another election, which would be Israel’s sixth since 2019.

At the same time, reviving the overhaul would probably revitalize the protests and potentially splinter Netanyahu’s government again. Either option could cost Netanyahu his power.

More news from Israel

Commentary

  • The overhaul would make Israel “more like elected autocracies” including Hungary and Turkey, Thomas Friedman argues in Times Opinion.
  • By trying to politicize the Supreme Court, the Israeli right is following the lead of American conservatives, Aron Heller writes in Times Opinion.
  • John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine sympathizes with the Israeli right’s critique of the judiciary and calls the protests “self-righteous.” He still thinks the government’s proposed overhaul was “a colossal mistake.”
 

THE LATEST NEWS

Nashville Shooting
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Woodmont Baptist Church after yesterday’s school shooting.Desiree Rios/The New York Times
  • An attacker armed with assault-style rifles killed three 9-year-olds and three adults at a school in Nashville before being killed by the police.
  • The school, part of the Covenant Presbyterian Church, serves about 200 students. Officials said the attacker, 28, was a former student there.
  • The head of the school and the daughter of the church’s pastor were among the victims.
  • Biden called the shooting “a family’s worst nightmare” and urged Congress to ban assault weapons.
  • “I think about it every day”: Americans spoke about the toll that gun violence takes on their mental health.
 
Politics
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Gov. Roy Cooper signing legislation to expand Medicaid in North Carolina yesterday.Eamon Queeney for The New York Times
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority to dictate curriculums, Jamelle Bouie writes.

Edward Hirsch writes that going blind has reinvigorated his daily life.

 
 

Sale ends soon: All of The Times. $1 a week.

The All Access sale is on. Enjoy it all — News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, together in one subscription. Subscribe today for $1 a week for unlimited access to everything we offer. Prices may vary by location.

 

MORNING READS

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
A Garde Robe by Uovo storage warehouse in Brooklyn.Peter Garritano for The New York Times

Save the gowns: What’s in this huge Brooklyn warehouse? Fashion history.

“The time has come”: Imitators of King Charles III are experiencing newfound popularity.

Crocs: People started buying the ugly-but-comfy clogs in the pandemic. They can’t stop.

Chicken scratch: It’s not just yours — everyone’s handwriting seems messy.

Metropolitan Diary: A sneeze, an open window and a near miss below.

Lives Lived: In 1969, a photographer captured Bobbi Ercoline embracing her boyfriend at Woodstock. The moment, enshrined on the cover of the festival’s ubiquitous album, became a symbol of hippiedom. Ercoline died at 73.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Zia Cooke of the South Carolina Gamecocks.Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

The women’s Final Four: South Carolina beat Maryland to reach the Final Four for the third straight time, and Virginia Tech overpowered Ohio State to claim the last spot in Dallas. On Friday, South Carolina will play Iowa, led by Caitlin Clark, and Louisiana State will face Virginia Tech, which has reached the semifinals for the first time.

Early favorites: The Houston Astros open the M.L.B. season on Thursday and occupy the top spot in the year’s first power rankings.

A souring relationship: The Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson publicized his trade request minutes before the Baltimore coach John Harbaugh was set to speak at the N.F.L. owners’ meetings.

 

ARTS AND IDEAS

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Mark McGuinness, a photographer, takes part in a universal basic income trial in Ireland.Ellius Grace for The New York Times

Ireland pays its artists

A government pilot program in Ireland is sending artists a weekly $350 check with no strings attached, allowing them to concentrate on creative pursuits without the pressures of a day job. “If I didn’t have this, I wouldn’t be doing art today,” said Ian Fay, a comic book artist in Kilkenny.

Ireland’s program stands out because of its rigor. Officials will study the 2,000 recipients’ finances, work patterns and well-being and compare them with those of a control group of artists getting no payments.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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The New York Times

Pasta with ricotta and lemon comes together in 15 minutes.

 
Theater

A Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd” is ravishingly sung and strangely hilarious.

 
What to Watch

Stream these five action movies.

 
Late Night

The hosts recapped a Donald Trump rally.

 
Now Time to Play
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was mortify. Here’s today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Not serious (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. China dissolved Tibet’s local government as the Dalai Lama fled into exile 64 years ago today.

The Daily” is about the fight over “Cop City.”

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 28, 2023

 

Good morning. Israel’s protests succeeded by uniting some of the country’s most influential institutions.

 
 
 
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Demonstrators in Jerusalem yesterday.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

Deep divisions

Much of life in Israel came to a halt yesterday: Hospitals stopped providing nonemergency care, planes were grounded at the country’s main airport, and malls and banks closed. The disruptions were part of an escalation in protests against the government’s proposed judicial overhaul, which has plunged Israel into one of its gravest political crises ever.

The interruptions to daily life were the latest sign that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had underestimated Israelis’ opposition to his government’s proposed changes to the courts. In response to the chaos, he has relented, at least in part. Netanyahu announced yesterday that he would delay the changes until later this year. “When there is a possibility of preventing a civil war through dialogue, I, as the prime minister, take a timeout for dialogue,” he said.

The announcement calmed some of the protesters and unions have called off their strikes. But it remains unclear what will happen in the coming weeks — and whether Netanyahu will continue pushing a proposal that has started to fracture even his own cabinet. Israel has dealt with deep political divisions for some time — holding five elections in four years — and the fight over the judicial overhaul has shown that those divisions persist.

Over the last two days, the opposition used all of its power to threaten to shut down the economy unless its views were taken into account, while the other side threatened to use its majority in Parliament to push through their political agenda, Patrick Kingsley, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, explained.

“It was a very high-stakes game of chicken,” Patrick says.

But there’s still disappointment and uncertainty on both sides. “The opposition fears that this overhaul may simply be reinstated in its current form at a later date,” Patrick says. Among right-wing voters, Patrick says, there’s a feeling that their votes don’t count.

Today’s newsletter will focus on the opposition to the overhaul and why it has succeeded, for now, after weeks of protests.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Watching Netanyahu’s speech in Tel Aviv yesterday.Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

Powerful opposition

What prompted such large-scale chaos? In short, the extreme change that many Israelis feared the proposed judicial overhaul would bring. Like its American counterpart, Israel’s Supreme Court is very powerful. But with the overhaul, Israel’s Parliament could override the court’s decisions with a simple majority, giving the government sweeping power to enact its preferred policies.

Netanyahu and his allies argue that the overhaul is needed to limit the courts’ power. They believe the courts have become increasingly aggressive and have undermined voters’ choices over the past three decades. One example: The Supreme Court’s blocking of some settlements in the West Bank.

The opposition argues that the overhaul would significantly weaken one of the few checks, besides elections, on Parliament. Israelis in the opposition tend to hold a more secular, pluralistic vision for the country, and see the courts as important to preserving that view. The opposition also says that Netanyahu is pushing for the changes to protect himself because he is standing trial on corruption charges. Netanyahu denies that claim as well as the charges.

That opposition has gained momentum because it unites influential parts of Israeli society: universities, unions and the reservists who play a key role in the military. The backing of such organizations is often the difference between successful and failed protest movements, as my colleague Amanda Taub has explained. “Support from those institutions can be a way for protests to gain leverage over leaders, often by splitting up elite coalitions,” Amanda said.

That kind of split is already visible in Netanyahu’s cabinet. Over the weekend, the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, spoke out against the proposed overhaul, citing opposition from members of the military. “I see how the source of our strength is being eroded,” Gallant said.

Importantly, opposition from within the military goes beyond ideology. Soldiers and reservists argue that if the courts are too weak to provide a check on the military, officials may be more likely to give illegal orders and potentially expose soldiers to prosecution in international courts. “Those concrete concerns about self-interest may be far more difficult for the government to defuse than if the protests were just motivated by ideology and political solidarity,” Amanda wrote.

Netanyahu fired Gallant on Sunday. The dismissal prompted the latest protests in the country, which in turn compelled Netanyahu to pause his plans.

What’s next

Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul was made possible by a rightward shift in Israeli politics, as this newsletter has explained. His backtracking in the face of heavy opposition suggests that perhaps Israel’s population hasn’t moved as far to the right as he believes.

The overhaul’s delay has calmed the situation for now. But it could also lead to more political chaos: Netanyahu’s coalition holds a slim majority in Parliament, and it could collapse if his right-wing allies believe he is going back on his word. That could force another election, which would be Israel’s sixth since 2019.

At the same time, reviving the overhaul would probably revitalize the protests and potentially splinter Netanyahu’s government again. Either option could cost Netanyahu his power.

More news from Israel

Commentary

  • The overhaul would make Israel “more like elected autocracies” including Hungary and Turkey, Thomas Friedman argues in Times Opinion.
  • By trying to politicize the Supreme Court, the Israeli right is following the lead of American conservatives, Aron Heller writes in Times Opinion.
  • John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine sympathizes with the Israeli right’s critique of the judiciary and calls the protests “self-righteous.” He still thinks the government’s proposed overhaul was “a colossal mistake.”
 

THE LATEST NEWS

Nashville Shooting
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Woodmont Baptist Church after yesterday’s school shooting.Desiree Rios/The New York Times
  • An attacker armed with assault-style rifles killed three 9-year-olds and three adults at a school in Nashville before being killed by the police.
  • The school, part of the Covenant Presbyterian Church, serves about 200 students. Officials said the attacker, 28, was a former student there.
  • The head of the school and the daughter of the church’s pastor were among the victims.
  • Biden called the shooting “a family’s worst nightmare” and urged Congress to ban assault weapons.
  • “I think about it every day”: Americans spoke about the toll that gun violence takes on their mental health.
 
Politics
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Gov. Roy Cooper signing legislation to expand Medicaid in North Carolina yesterday.Eamon Queeney for The New York Times
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority to dictate curriculums, Jamelle Bouie writes.

Edward Hirsch writes that going blind has reinvigorated his daily life.

 
 

Sale ends soon: All of The Times. $1 a week.

The All Access sale is on. Enjoy it all — News, plus Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, together in one subscription. Subscribe today for $1 a week for unlimited access to everything we offer. Prices may vary by location.

 

MORNING READS

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
A Garde Robe by Uovo storage warehouse in Brooklyn.Peter Garritano for The New York Times

Save the gowns: What’s in this huge Brooklyn warehouse? Fashion history.

“The time has come”: Imitators of King Charles III are experiencing newfound popularity.

Crocs: People started buying the ugly-but-comfy clogs in the pandemic. They can’t stop.

Chicken scratch: It’s not just yours — everyone’s handwriting seems messy.

Metropolitan Diary: A sneeze, an open window and a near miss below.

Lives Lived: In 1969, a photographer captured Bobbi Ercoline embracing her boyfriend at Woodstock. The moment, enshrined on the cover of the festival’s ubiquitous album, became a symbol of hippiedom. Ercoline died at 73.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Zia Cooke of the South Carolina Gamecocks.Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

The women’s Final Four: South Carolina beat Maryland to reach the Final Four for the third straight time, and Virginia Tech overpowered Ohio State to claim the last spot in Dallas. On Friday, South Carolina will play Iowa, led by Caitlin Clark, and Louisiana State will face Virginia Tech, which has reached the semifinals for the first time.

Early favorites: The Houston Astros open the M.L.B. season on Thursday and occupy the top spot in the year’s first power rankings.

A souring relationship: The Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson publicized his trade request minutes before the Baltimore coach John Harbaugh was set to speak at the N.F.L. owners’ meetings.

 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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Mark McGuinness, a photographer, takes part in a universal basic income trial in Ireland.Ellius Grace for The New York Times

Ireland pays its artists

A government pilot program in Ireland is sending artists a weekly $350 check with no strings attached, allowing them to concentrate on creative pursuits without the pressures of a day job. “If I didn’t have this, I wouldn’t be doing art today,” said Ian Fay, a comic book artist in Kilkenny.

Ireland’s program stands out because of its rigor. Officials will study the 2,000 recipients’ finances, work patterns and well-being and compare them with those of a control group of artists getting no payments.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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The New York Times

Pasta with ricotta and lemon comes together in 15 minutes.

 
Theater

A Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd” is ravishingly sung and strangely hilarious.

 
What to Watch

Stream these five action movies.

 
Late Night

The hosts recapped a Donald Trump rally.

 
Now Time to Play
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was mortify. Here’s today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Not serious (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. China dissolved Tibet’s local government as the Dalai Lama fled into exile 64 years ago today.

The Daily” is about the fight over “Cop City.”

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 29, 2023

 

Good morning. Obamacare’s win in North Carolina is a sign of larger changes.

 
 
 
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Gov. Roy Cooper in Raleigh, N.C.Eamon Queeney for The New York Times

What it once was like

The government benefits began their existence as objects of partisan rancor and harsh criticism. Eventually, though, they became so popular that politicians of both parties promised to protect them.

It was true of Social Security and Medicare. And now the pattern seems to be repeating itself with Obamacare.

Consider what has happened recently in North Carolina: Only a decade after the state’s Republican politicians described the law as dangerous and refused to sign up for its expansion of Medicaid, Republicans and Democrats came together to pass such an expansion. The Republican-controlled House in North Carolina passed the bill 87 to 24, while the Republican-controlled Senate passed it 44 to 2.

“Wow, have things changed,” Jonathan Cohn wrote in a HuffPost piece explaining how the turnabout happened.

Obamacare — the country’s largest expansion of health insurance since Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 — is still not as widely accepted as those programs. North Carolina became the 40th state to agree to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, which means that 10 states still have not, including two of the largest, Texas and Florida. In those states, more than 3.5 million adults lack health insurance as a result.

But the list of states signing up for the program seems to be moving in only one direction: It keeps growing.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation

‘Humiliation’

In its growing acceptance, Obamacare resembles other major parts of the federal safety net:

  • When Congress was considering Social Security in 1935, conservatives and many business executives bitterly criticized it. One Texas newspaper described Social Security as “a huge sales tax on everybody on behalf of the oldsters.” A Wall Street Journal editorial predicted that the law would eventually be reason for Congress to look back in “humiliation.” Not exactly: Social Security is so popular that it is known as a third rail in American politics.
  • When Congress was debating Medicare in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan — then an actor with a rising political profile — attacked the program as a step toward socialism. If it passed, Reagan warned, “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” As president, Reagan praised and supported the program.
  • After Congress created Medicaid — a health-insurance program primarily for low-income households — in 1965, some states did not initially join it. Arizona became the last to do so, in 1982.

Roberts and McCain

In the initial years after Obamacare’s passage in 2010, it was similarly divisive. Blue states embraced it, while many red states rejected its voluntary Medicaid expansion. In Washington, congressional Republicans and Donald Trump tried to repeal it. Some Republican-appointed judges invalidated parts of it, and every Republican appointee on the Supreme Court except Chief Justice John Roberts voted to scrap the law.

Twice, it survived by a single vote — first, by Roberts’s 2012 Supreme Court vote, and then by Senator John McCain’s late-night vote against its repeal in 2017. Since then, however, Obamacare has been gaining Republican support.

The next year, voters in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah — red states, all — passed ballot initiatives expanding Medicaid. Oklahoma, Missouri and South Dakota have since done so. Montana’s state legislature has also approved an expansion.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
American Medical Association Communications Division

In 2019, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat, narrowly won election in a Republican state by pledging to protect an earlier Medicaid expansion. In North Carolina, Roy Cooper, also a Democrat, became governor in a 2016 upset partly by campaigning in favor of an expansion — and was able to sign one this week.

(Before it takes effect, Cooper and the legislature must agree on a state budget.)

These developments are a sign of the law’s growing popularity. And that popularity isn’t especially mysterious: In a country with high levels of economic inequality and large numbers of people without health insurance, Obamacare has increased taxes on the affluent to subsidize health care for poor and middle-class families. At root, it is an effort to reduce inequality.

Winning the middle

Even with its flaws — including its often complicated process for signing up for insurance — the law has achieved many of its aims. The number of Americans without health insurance has plummeted. In states that have refused the Medicaid expansion, by contrast, rural hospitals are struggling even more than elsewhere because they do not receive the law’s subsidies for care.

Greenwood Leflore Hospital — in the Mississippi Delta — is an example. It recently closed its intensive-care unit and maternity ward, as our colleague Sharon LaFraniere has reported. Nationwide, states that did not quickly accept Medicaid expansion have accounted for almost three-quarters of rural hospital closures between 2010 and 2021, according to the American Hospital Association.

Similar problems in North Carolina were a reason that Republicans there reconsidered their opposition to Medicaid expansion. “We had these people coming down to Raleigh, farmers, business owners, people from rural areas, they were advocating, telling stories,” one Republican state representative told HuffPost.

Many Republicans still oppose Obamacare, and some hard-right members of Congress also favor cuts to Medicaid — as well as to Medicare and Social Security. In a country as polarized as the United States, there isn’t much true political consensus. But Obamacare has won over the political middle more quickly than seemed likely not so long ago.

Related: The number of people signing up for insurance through Obamacare has surged over the past two years, partly because of a new subsidies signed by President Biden.

 

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THE LATEST NEWS

Politics
 
Migrant Deaths
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A mourner in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.Go Nakamura for The New York Times
 
Business
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

The success of Israel’s protests suggests that its democracy is healthier than many feared, Bret Stephens writes.

How can doctors better discuss dying with their patients? Start by trusting them, Dr. Sunita Puri writes.

 
 

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MORNING READS

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“La Ronde Enfantine,” painted circa 1862.The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Stolen painting: He lost a Courbet when he fled the Nazis. His heirs are getting it back.

15-minute city: A professor is getting death threats for his walkable urban design plan.

A discovery: He solved a math problem by finding what’s known as an einstein.

Midday snooze: Can a nap make up for a bad night of sleep?

Advice from Wirecutter: Pick the best VPN.

Lives Lived: Born into poverty in the segregated South, Randall Robinson galvanized Americans against South African apartheid and advocated on behalf of Haitian refugees. He died at 81.

 

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

N.C.A.A. women’s tournament: Iowa vs. South Carolina is the Final Four matchup many wanted — and the one the sport deserves.

A potential $6 billion deal: Multiple bidders have submitted offers to buy the Washington Commanders, including a group that includes Magic Johnson as an investor.

Patriots won’t pursue Jackson: New England is out of the Lamar Jackson stakes, and plans to stick with Mac Jones as its quarterback.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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The pistachio Suprême croissant from Lafayette.Julia Gartland for The New York Times

The ever-changing croissant

Apparently there’s no end to the forms a croissant can take.

Ten years after the Cronut, pastry chefs are twisting croissant dough into pinwheels and squiggles, tying it in knots and stacking it into cubes. They are turning it into breakfast cereal, tie-dyeing it and, in one case, wrapping it around baguettes.

When the baker Scott Cioe wanted to lure crowds to Lafayette, a Manhattan restaurant, he turned to croissant dough, coiling it into a photogenic swirl he called the Suprême. “We eat with our eyes as well as our hands,” Cioe told The Times.

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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Julia Gartland for The New York Times

Try cooking pasta like risotto, adding liquid gradually so that the noodles absorb it completely. The result is a creamy, rich dish.

 
What to Watch

Rob Lowe and John Owen Lowe star in “Unstable,” a new Netflix series that exaggerates their barbed father-son dynamic.

 
What to Listen to

Lana Del Rey’s ninth album asks big, earnest questions and isn’t afraid to get messy.

 
Late Night

Stephen Colbert called the Nashville shooting horrible and familiar.

 
Now Time to Play
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were calculator and coloratura. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Really awesome (four letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

P.S. Nicholas Nehamas is joining The Times from The Miami Herald, to cover Ron DeSantis.

The Daily” is about Israel.

Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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March 30, 2023

 

Good morning. Ukraine is again defying the odds in the battle for Bakhmut.

 
 
 
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Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, Ukraine.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

A costly clash

Early this month, the head of NATO warned that the fierce battle over the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut could end with a Russian victory within days. Three weeks later, his prediction has yet to come true. Ukraine and Russia are still fighting for control of the city.

The stalemate has come at great cost for both sides, particularly Russia. Ukrainian officials have estimated that for every one of their soldiers lost, Russia has lost seven. Russia tried to replenish its ranks by letting prisoners fight, but it has nearly exhausted the supply of those recruits as well.

The battle has also taken a heavy toll on munitions, vehicles and other military equipment — and has also taken a lot of time. The first time this newsletter mentioned Bakhmut was in July, when Russia increased its attacks near the city.

Russia could still capture Bakhmut, and some analysts expect it to do so. But for now, the battle over the city has become yet another example of Ukraine defying the odds and of Russia performing worse than many experts expected. Today’s newsletter will explain why both sides have put so much into Bakhmut — and why it could have important consequences for the broader war.

Wanting a win

Bakhmut has little strategic value, U.S. officials say. The city is in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s primary target in the war, but there is nothing uniquely valuable about the city for the war effort.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
By The New York Times

So why has Russia thrown so much into taking it? Because Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is desperate for a win — any win. The war has not gone as well for Russia as most people expected. In the past several months, Russia has lost territory, pulling back in both the northeastern and southern fronts. The original goal — to take Kyiv and topple the Ukrainian government — now seems beyond reach.

If Russia can take Bakhmut now, Putin can argue to the Russian people, to his allies in China and Iran and to Western supporters of Ukraine that Russia is making gains and has momentum. A win could boost morale among Russian forces and hurt international support for Ukraine. With the spring expected to bring better weather for renewed offenses, that boost to Russia could help its military get back on track in the war.

Conversely, the perception that a victory in Bakhmut could raise Russian morale and sink Ukrainian hopes has also turned the city into a symbol for Ukraine. Its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said that a Russian seizure of Bakhmut would let Putin argue that he has the advantage. “If he will feel some blood — smell that we are weak — he will push, push, push,” Zelensky said this week.

But even if Russia takes Bakhmut, the win might amount to little gain at great cost. Russia will have lost so many troops and so much equipment trying to take a city of scant strategic value that it may have been better off never mounting an offensive.

And a Russian failure to take Bakhmut altogether would be an astonishing defeat. After all, if Russia can’t capture the city even with the investment of so many resources, how can it expect to win the broader war?

“Bakhmut will always be a Pyrrhic victory for Russia. It gets them nothing,” said my colleague Michael Schwirtz, who has covered the war from Ukraine. “But if Ukraine manages to push them back, it will be a disaster.”

What comes next

The battle could also have negative consequences for Ukraine. Its military has put resources toward the fight there that could have gone elsewhere, particularly to an offensive this spring. Ukraine wants to not only retake lost land through a renewed offensive but also split Russian forces in the east from those in the south.

“If a Ukrainian offensive in the weeks ahead comes close but falls short, there will be recriminations about whether such an effort could have been more successful if resources had not been diverted to Bakhmut,” said my colleague Julian Barnes, who covers national security.

But it’s also possible that the battle for Bakhmut could help Ukraine’s next offensive, by having forced Russia to spend so many resources on the city. How the fighting in Bakhmut will be judged, then, depends on what happens next and how the consequences play out on the rest of the battlefield.

More on the war

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A timeline and map of Kyiv and the surrounding areas.NASA Black Marble Team, Goddard Space Flight Center
 

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THE LATEST NEWS

International
  • Mexico is investigating the deaths of at least 39 people at a migrant detention center near the U.S. border as a homicide case.
  • Pope Francis, 86, is in the hospital in Rome, where he is being treated for a respiratory infection.
  • A fire on a passenger ferry in the Philippines killed at least 28 people.
  • China spent billions to become a major player in soccer, but the experiment was a flop.
  • A Chinese billionaire used to have ties to the Chinese Communist Party and Donald Trump’s allies. Now, he’s accused of fraud on two continents.
 
Politics
 
Other Big Stories
 
Opinions

By missing a chance to learn from their opponent, the Stanford students who heckled a conservative judge hurt themselves the most, Pamela Paul says.

Today’s anti-affirmative action lawsuits rest on a false premise: No one is entitled to get into an elite college, no matter their achievements, Serena Puang argues.

Too many prisoners emerge stigmatized and lacking basic skills. California’s rehabilitation experiment aims to change that, Bill Keller writes.

Next week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election is the most important political contest of 2023, Michelle Goldberg writes.

 
 

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MORNING READS

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Children capturing their family vacations.The New York Times

A new perspective: Famous landmarks, disposable cameras and a glimpse of the world through kids’ eyes.

Up for auction: A 2007 iPhone can be yours — for at least $32,000.

Courtroom couture: Gwyneth Paltrow is dressing like a Park City local at her ski trial. It’s working, The Times’s fashion critic writes.

“Stay away”: An Amsterdam ad campaign tells young British men to pick a different vacation destination.

Advice from Wirecutter: How to avoid bed bugs when traveling.

Lives Lived: Julie Anne Peters published “Luna,” thought to be the first young-adult novel with a transgender character released by a mainstream publisher, in 2004. Peters died at 71.

 

SPORTS NEWS

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A spring training game.Rebecca Noble for The New York Times

Happy Opening Day! All 30 Major League Baseball teams will play today. Here are a few stories to get you ready:

  • On “The Daily,” The Times’s Michael Schmidt explains the plan to save baseball from the tyranny of the home run.

To follow along all season, sign up for The Windup, an Athletic newsletter from Levi Weaver, Ken Rosenthal and others.

 

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ARTS AND IDEAS

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A flying sequence for “Peter Pan Goes Wrong.”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

Wrong on purpose

At a rehearsal for a new Broadway take on “Peter Pan,” an actor swung wildly around the stage, crashing into the set and screaming. All was going according to plan.

“Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” a slapstick comedy set to open next month, comes from Mischief, a company that specializes in deconstructing theater tropes with the timing of “The Three Stooges.” Mischief’s first show spoofed Agatha Christie.

“I’ve gained a bruise or two in rehearsal,” Greg Tannahill, who plays Pan, told The Times. “But you’ve got to break a few eggs to make a lovely omelet.”

 

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook
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David Malosh for The New York Times

These breakfast burritos include soft scrambled eggs, refried beans and avocado.

 
Behind the Scenes

The making of a “John Wick: Chapter 4” action scene. (Contains spoilers.)

 
Late Night

Jimmy Kimmel joked about waiting for Trump’s potential indictment.

 
Now Time to Play
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was outfoxed. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Best friend of Charlie Brown (five letters).

And here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. How do they play Wordle? The actor Danica McKellar, the novelists Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Sabaa Tahir, as well as Times journalists, narrate their personal approaches.

Kitty Bennett, Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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April 1, 2023

 

I’m turning over today’s newsletter to my colleague Amy Virshup, The Times’s travel editor, to look at how vacation habits are shifting now. See you next Saturday. — Melissa Kirsch

 
 

By Amy Virshup

Good morning. We take our children on vacation to expose them to history, novelty and beauty.

 
 
 
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
María Jesús Contreras

Hit the road

When I was a child, we rarely went on big family trips.

Part of that is generational. I was born in the ’60s, when the lives of children and their parents were more separate. Air travel was still special and, in my family, reserved for the adults. But there was something innate, too. I think some people are wanderers, and others are not. We had a vacation house in the same state as our “real” house, and when vacation time rolled around, that’s where we went.

In my own life as a parent, I’ve leaned hard the opposite way. I have a photograph of my son at 2½, peering into a fancy bathtub at a hotel in Paris. Before he was 10 he’d traveled to China. I didn’t take an international flight until my junior year of college.

The pandemic put our journeys on hold for a while; our 2020 trip to Japan is now planned for later this year. But it seems as if everyone is on the move and families aren’t leaving anyone home with the babysitter. Hotels are ditching “no children” rules. Generations are heading off together, often with grandparents and grandkids sharing their own adventure and leaving parents out of it. That kind of shift in how we vacation inspired me and my colleagues on The Times’s travel desk to put together a special package published this week on family travel.

Why take the kids along? I think that those of us who do hope our children will be more curious, more tolerant and better able to negotiate the world. We take our children to museums, hoping our love of culture will rub off; we explore the natural world, hoping to get them to look up and experience the earth’s beauty; we mix in some history with the child-centric activities to help them understand the tides that continue to carry us along.

On that trip to France when my son was little, we went to Giverny to see Monet’s house and dragged him through the Louvre in a stroller. We also rented a farmhouse in the south of France that was surrounded by vineyards. One morning, a big blue grape-harvesting machine arrived, driving through the rows of vines and pulling the ripe grapes into its maw. My son was enthralled. For him, it was the highlight of the trip.

And who is to say he was wrong?

For more

 

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THE WEEK IN CULTURE

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A scene from “Yellowjackets.”Kailey Schwerman/Showtime.
  • “Yellowjackets,” whose second season started this past week, presents one of the most sensitive portraits of women on television, Lydia Kiesling writes in The Times Magazine.
  • The creators of “Yellowjackets” said they didn’t set out to merely tease the show’s most macabre elements.
  • Walter Cole, otherwise known as Darcelle XV, who dazzled as the world’s oldest drag performer, died at 92.
  • A Mexican grandmother has become one of the most-watched cooks online.
  • Millions of people in China have lost access to video games like World of Warcraft because of a failed deal between executives at the companies NetEase and Activision Blizzard.
  • The movie “Measures of Men” tells the story of a different German genocide, in what is now Namibia.
  • Adam Sandler has grown up into a more nuanced comedy performer in “Murder Mystery,” our critic writes.
  • At 95, the artist Lois Dodd is getting her largest museum show yet at the newly expanded Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn.
  • D.M. Thomas, an English novelist who wrote the surprise best seller “The White Hotel,” died at 88.
  • Kieran Culkin, a star of the HBO show “Succession,” spoke to Esquire about his brother’s fame, playing Roman Roy and more.
  • Fashion labels like Burberry revealed new logos.
 

THE LATEST NEWS

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Supporters of Donald Trump outside his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.Josh Ritchie for The New York Times
  • Donald Trump prepared to surrender in Manhattan next week in the first indictment in the U.S. of a former president, and the police there braced for protests.
  • The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, resurrected the Trump case by converting a skeptic in his office and adding a veteran lawyer to lead the inquiry.
  • Trump’s Republican rivals shied away from attacking him.
  • Some previous Trump voters said it was time to move on in seeking a 2024 presidential nominee.
  • A deadly storm system spawned tornadoes throughout the U.S., causing destruction from Wisconsin to Texas. At least six people were killed.
  • Russian troops captured criminals as they withdrew from a Ukrainian city and took some of them on an odyssey through five prisons and five countries.
 
 

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CULTURE CALENDAR

🍿 “Tetris” (out now) and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” (Friday): Just a few weeks past the season finale of HBO’s hit series “The Last of Us” and we’re crashing into two consecutive weekends of ’80s video game adaptations — Apple TV+’s “Tetris” and the highly anticipated big-screen animated version of “It’s a me, Mario!” Maybe the industry is finally realizing that because games are many things, their adaptations can be anything (a zombie post-apocalypse series, a Cold War dramedy, a silly family film).

📚 “Finding Me” (Tuesday): This year, Viola Davis became one of the rare artists to notch an EGOT, having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. She joined the club by winning a Grammy for narrating her best-selling memoir. You can get that audiobook or wait for the paperback, out this week.

 

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RECIPE OF THE WEEK

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Sang An for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.

Huevos Rancheros

I’m a strong advocate of eggs for dinner, especially when they are paired with rich beans and zesty sauce, as they are in classic huevos rancheros. But of course you could make Kay Chun’s majorly flavorful version of the dish any time of day, and with remarkable ease.

 

REAL ESTATE

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Dana Gibson, 50, owns a home in Memphis.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times

A starter home for retirement: First-time home buyers in the U.S. have never been older.

Peoria, Ill.: A TikToker brought hundreds of transplants to a Midwestern city.

What you get for $2 million: A Tudor Revival house in Seattle; a 2021 home in Santa Fe, N.M.; or a circa 1750 Colonial in Concord, Mass.

The hunt: She wanted a studio in east Manhattan for $600,000. Which home did she choose? Play our game.

Window shopping: The interior décor store KRB in Manhattan is part shop and part workshop for experiments in blending objects of varying quality and provenance.

 

LIVING

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The Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve in California.Stella Kalinina for The New York Times

Super bloom: 10 places to see flowers in the West right now.

Dating: Seeking romance? Try moving abroad.

Avoid the scale: Three ways to find out how fit you are.

Run better: Use your diaphragm to breathe.

Shoulder pads: A resurgence is coming.

 

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Elevate the Easter basket

Easter morning is just a week away, and if you’re gathering goodies for the kids, Wirecutter has ideas. There’s candy, of course; we’re partial to Cadbury Mini Eggs, Jelly Bellies and seasonal treats from See’s. Simple springtime toys like bubbles, sidewalk chalk and jump ropes are classic. We also like anchoring a basket with a special book, stuffed animal or toy — a sweet Folkmanis hand puppet and a white Lego rabbit are new favorites. Searching for a basket? Instead of a junky version that’ll end up in the landfill, a cute canvas tote or an inexpensive plastic beach bucket can sub in nicely. — Kalee Thompson

 

GAME OF THE WEEKEND

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Caitlin Clark led Iowa to victory over South Carolina.Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press

Women’s N.C.A.A. basketball championship: Iowa upset South Carolina last night, 77-73, ending the Gamecocks’ perfect season behind yet another remarkable game from Caitlin Clark, who had 41 points. The Hawkeyes will play Louisiana State, which beat Virginia Tech. The Tigers have made a major turnaround in just two years under Coach Kim Mulkey. It helps to have Angel Reese, a star forward, whose 33 double-doubles this season tied an N.C.A.A. record. 3:30 p.m. Eastern tomorrow on ABC.

 

NOW TIME TO PLAY

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The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was braying. Here is today’s puzzle.

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

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The Morning Newsletter Logo

Editor: David Leonhardt

Deputy Editor: Amy Fiscus

News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti

News Staff: Lauren Jackson, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu

News Assistant: Lauren Hard

Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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April 2, 2023

 

Good morning. We talk with Maggie Haberman to prepare you for the week when Donald Trump will likely be arrested.

 
 
 
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Former President Donald Trump gesturing to supporters.Evan Vucci/Associated Press

Angry and rattled

Donald Trump is expected to fly to New York this week from his home in Florida to be arrested. For now, the specific charges are unknown because the indictment is under seal, but they involve his role in the payment of hush money during the 2016 presidential campaign to cover up an extramarital affair.

To help you get ready for the week ahead, I talked with my colleague Maggie Haberman, who’s known for her behind-the-scenes reporting on Trump.

David: You’ve reported that Trump and his aides were surprised by the news and didn’t expect an indictment for a few weeks — if at all. What’s the atmosphere like at Mar-a-Lago on the days after?

Maggie: They’re still trying to assess what is happening on a few fronts. One is the political front, which I’d say they were most prepared on.

Another is the legal front, which is messy because his team has had a lot of infighting, and there’s finger pointing about why they were so caught off guard. The lawyers also don’t yet know the charges because it’s a sealed indictment.

Finally, there is the emotional front. While Trump is not said to be throwing things, he is extremely angry and his family is, not surprisingly, rattled.

The other cases

David: My instinct is that this indictment may make an indictment in one of the other cases — the investigations into Trump’s actions in Georgia after the 2020 election, his involvement in the Jan. 6 attack and his handling of classified documents — more likely. After all, one of the issues apparently giving pause to prosecutors was the idea that they would be the first ever to indict an ex-president. That potential barrier is gone. Nobody can know what will happen in those other cases, but does that basic dynamic seem correct?

Maggie: You raise a point some lawyers have raised privately. All the prosecutors were concerned about being first with a historical precedent. And now there is a broken seal of sorts. That said, Republicans who dislike Trump are saying privately they wish this case wasn’t first because they view it as more trivial than the others.

David: Is there one of those other investigations that most worries Trumpworld?

Maggie: Georgia has bothered Trump personally for a while, possibly because there are tapes of him telling officials to find votes. Some of his aides are very worried about the documents investigation that the Justice Department has. It’s a clearer-cut issue, and a federal judge overseeing grand jury matters showed in a recent ruling that she’s taking the government’s claims seriously.

David: Trump has faced major legal threats to his business career in the past and always managed to escape criminal charges. How does this compare to those earlier threats?

Maggie: Trump has been trying to avoid being indicted since he was first criminally investigated in the 1970s. He actually hasn’t faced enormous criminal legal threats since then. He has instead operated in a world in which so much is based on machine politics and what Marie Brenner, the journalist, once described as New York’s “favor economy.”

A project involving two of his kids was investigated by the Manhattan district attorney about a decade ago, but for a variety of reasons there were no indictments. Then, when he was president, he was protected because of a Justice Department opinion against indicting a sitting president. It’s worth remembering his company was convicted on 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes last year. So this is something of a slow roll.

Trump up, DeSantis down

David: The last few weeks of Republican primary polls have looked pretty good for Trump: He’s up, and Ron DeSantis is down. Depending on which polls you believe, Trump either has a sizable lead or the two are close. Apart from the indictment, why do Trump and his team think he’s surged? And how do they see the politics of an indictment playing out?

Maggie: I think nearly every national poll shows Trump with a sizable lead. Polls this early aren’t great predictors, but they are a snapshot of what has been pretty durable support Trump has among Republican primary voters.

Trump’s team thinks it’s had a pretty good few months politically — it has, in fairness — and that DeSantis has struggled to gain traction. That is striking since DeSantis has been on a book tour. Trump’s team believes this indictment will help him raise money and could give him some boost — and maybe political antibodies when and if future indictments come from other investigations.

It was lost on no one on Trump’s team that DeSantis — after initially trying to minimize a possible indictment as an issue that voters care about and speaking about it later than other Republicans — rushed out with a statement once an indictment happened attacking it as “un-American” and saying Florida wouldn’t help extradite Trump. It tells you a great deal about the grip Trump still has.

More on Trump

 

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NEWS

War in Ukraine
 
Other Big Stories
  • The death toll from the tornadoes that tore through the South and Midwest this weekend rose to 23.
  • UConn beat Miami to reach the men’s N.C.A.A. championship game. The team will face San Diego State, which defeated Florida Atlantic on a buzzer-beater.
  • Iowa’s win over South Carolina in the women’s basketball tournament drew 5.5 million viewers, the largest audience ever for a semifinal.
  • Paul Vallas is highlighting his record leading troubled public schools as he runs to be Chicago’s mayor.
 

FROM OPINION

A San Francisco apartment complex is an affordable-housing success story. But how it became one should worry liberals, Ezra Klein writes.

Euthanizing an ailing pet is the right choice. It’s also a formula for shame and regret, Karen Fine argues.

 
 

The Sunday question: Can protests save Israel’s democracy?

Israelis’ disciplined grass-roots resistance succeeded in forcing the government to delay its judicial overhaul plan, says CNN’s Frida Ghitis. But the government remains determined, and the debate that underlies the crisis — about how Israel should treat the Palestinians — may divide the opposition, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer argue in Foreign Policy.

 
 

The complete Times subscription.

The Morning offers daily highlights from The Times — but for the complete Times experience, subscribe to All Access.

 

MORNING READS

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Low-lying areas in Venice still flood.Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Saving Venice: The city has amazing new sea walls, but floods aren’t its only problem.

Locker-room celebrations: A win means water, everywhere.

Pitch clocks: See how baseball’s new rules are changing the game.

Vows: Two acrobats fell for each other.

Sunday routine: A milliner visits Fanelli Cafe and Film Forum.

Advice from Wirecutter: These are the best water bottles.

Lives lived: Margot Stern Strom was a schoolteacher, then started an organization that challenged teenagers to understand the roots of injustice. She died at 81.

 

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BOOKS

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Rachel Stern for The New York Times

“Mating”: People thinking about long-term romance are sharing this ’90s novel.

By the Book: The author Sarah Bakewell tends to avoid thrillers and mysteries.

Our editors’ picks: “The Half Known Life,” which examines ideas of paradise around the world, and eight other books.

Times best sellers: “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” by John Green, makes a first appearance on the paperback nonfiction list.

 

THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

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Juan Arredondo for The New York Times Magazine.

On the cover: The challenge of counting every birth and death.

Ethicist: Her husband no longer wants sex. Is that grounds for divorce?

Eat: South American sopa de maní is soulful and steadying.

 

THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For
  • For Western Christians, today is Palm Sunday, the start of Holy Week.
  • Iowa and Louisiana State will play for the women’s N.C.A.A. basketball championship this afternoon, and the men’s final is tomorrow, pitting UConn against San Diego State.
  • Trump is expected to surrender in Manhattan on Tuesday.
  • Two major elections will be held on Tuesday: A runoff will decide the mayor’s race in Chicago, and Wisconsin will fill a vacancy on its state Supreme Court.
  • Passover begins at sundown Wednesday.
  • The U.S. government will release monthly jobs numbers on Friday.
  • The U.S. stock markets will be closed on Good Friday.
 
What to Cook This Week
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David Malosh for The New York Times

Emily Weinstein recently found herself with leftover herbs. This week, her Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter is filled with recipes to use them: one-pan crispy chicken and chickpeas, which calls for herby yogurt on the side; baked chicken and feta meatballs; and coconut-caramel braised tofu, a quick vegan meal that would be superb with basil and cilantro.

 

NOW TIME TO PLAY

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%

The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were anticlimactic and claimant. Here is today’s puzzle.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Astounded (five letters).

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.

Here’s today’s Wordle.

 
 

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — David

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The Morning Newsletter Logo

Editor: David Leonhardt

Deputy Editor: Amy Fiscus

News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti

News Staff: Lauren Jackson, Sean Kawasaki-Culligan, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ashley Wu

News Assistant: Lauren Hard

Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch

phkrause

By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near. {5T 451.1}
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