Jump to content
ClubAdventist is back!

Recommended Posts

  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Replies 858
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

  • phkrause

    858

  • Hanseng

    1

  • Members
Posted

Good morning. Is the Democratic Party again starting to pay more attention to labor unions?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 11, 2023

 

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

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

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
Miu Miu’s fall 2023 show.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times
 

THE LATEST NEWS

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

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 12, 2023

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 13, 2023

 

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

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

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

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
A drilling camp at the proposed site of an oil project in Alaska.ConocoPhillips, via Associated Press
 
International
 
Other Big Stories
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
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.

 
 

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

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

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

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted

Good morning. Deregulation contributed to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.

 
 
 
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
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
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
President Biden, flanked by the leaders of Australia and Britain.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
 
War in Ukraine
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic01.nyt.com%
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.

 
 

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

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

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 15, 2023

 

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

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

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

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

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

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

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 16, 2023

 

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 17, 2023

 

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

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

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

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

THE LATEST NEWS

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

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

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

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

ARTS AND IDEAS

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 18, 2023

 

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

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

 
 

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.

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

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

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

 

ADVERTISEMENT

Ad
 
 

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

phkrause

Obstinacy is a barrier to all improvement. - ChL 60
  • Members
Posted
mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.nytimes.co

March 19, 2023

 

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