Members phkrause Posted Saturday at 11:18 PM Author Members Posted Saturday at 11:18 PM August 28, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. Authorities in Nepal are warning rescuers that more flooding may be on its way. Let’s start there. Atul Loke for The New York Times After the deluge As emergency workers flew helicopters up steep Himalayan river valleys yesterday to find survivors of a flood that killed more than 500 people and left more than 1,000 missing, scientists began to investigate its cause. They’ve been looking at satellite imagery and seismological data. The likely culprit: A gigantic landslide high in the mountains led to a glacial collapse that sent millions of tons of ice and rock into the valleys below it, pulverizing them into mud and water. The slurry burst dams and turned rivers into hydraulic rams. “The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed,” one scientist said. The scale of the disaster is staggering. It’s as if 1,000 Empire State Buildings exploded at the same time and the debris coursed down a canyon. The path of destruction ran for more than 40 miles. It washed away roads, cut bridges in half, overcame buildings and swallowed people whole. On the ground The Nepal Army carrying young children to a rescue helicopter to help their parents board. Atul Loke for The New York Times Anupreeta Das, who covers South Asia, was in Nepal yesterday, flying with rescuers to interview shocked survivors. They told her about the torrents of mud that brought horror into their lives. Here’s what she heard from a resident of a village close to Nepal’s border with Tibet: “They all died, and I lived,” said Dawa Lama, 45, starting to weep as he recounted how, just before 9 a.m. on Wednesday, he had heard a thunderclap, and then felt a breeze. Before he knew it, an enormous wave of muddy water had slammed into his home of 12 years in the border village of Timure, carrying away not just his belongings but also his wife and their two daughters, 7 and 8. Read more from the survivors here. Our changing climate Source: Satellite image by Copernicus and Landsat via Google | By The New York Times Scientists may still be putting together the exact causes of this week’s floods, but they are certain that climate change is heating the Himalayas and increasing the risks of disaster. Here’s why: A warming planet is melting the region’s permafrost, the mixture of frozen soil and rocks that has sat below its glaciers for millennia. Losing it leaves mountains and glaciers unstable — prone to landslides and collapse. “As the glaciers retreat and the permafrost melts, we see that these slopes become more susceptible to failure,” one scientist who studies glaciers told The Times, adding, “There’s a very straight link between climate change and these types of disasters.” More on the flooding Read why climate change is making flooding disasters more likely. See maps and images of the devastation. In The Kathmandu Post, a journalist wrote about seeing his childhood village disappear. MORNING READS Getty Images We’ve made these links free for you. Blended refreshers: Your favorite Starbucks drink may be making your barista break out in hives. Iceland Eclipse festival: Meet the most optimistic people in the world. Your pick: The most clicked story in The Morning yesterday was a video of the flooding in Nepal. LAKE ONTARI … OH! President Trump signed an executive order yesterday renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, effective immediately. The lake sits between the United States and Canada, so it’s a symbolic target amid the trade war between the two countries. (Trump said yesterday that Canada “treats us very badly.”) Legally speaking, the order — like Trump’s earlier one to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America — likely requires only federal entities to recognize the change. Other countries don’t have to recognize it. Nor do Americans and their businesses, even those within spitting distance of Lake … whatever you call it. (The Times will continue to call it Ontario.) Amanda Miller, 45, owns Lake Ontario Realty, which has helped people buy and sell waterfront properties in the area for over 20 years. By yesterday afternoon, her phone was blowing up. Everyone wanted to know: Would it be “Lake America Realty” now? No. It’s nothing personal, Miller told me; business is business. Lake Ontario Realty is well-known in the area around Chaumont, N.Y., and rebranding for no reason is “the worst thing you can do,” she said. — Evan Gorelick Related: A Canadian official said the U.S. had raised issues with the country’s use of the French language in trade negotiations — and that if the Trump administration changed course, trade talks could potentially resume. THE LATEST NEWS Foreign Policy John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, made a secretive visit to Moscow. He urged the Russians to end their war against Ukraine before their military and economic situation gets worse. The Pentagon will withdraw about 200 U.S. troops from Nigeria. They were deployed to help fight Islamist militants who President Trump said were attacking Christians. Politics The New York Times Angie Nixon, who scored a surprise victory in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, made pink the signature color of her campaign. Our chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, examines the choice. Click above to watch. The administration of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money by diverting it to a charity tied to his wife, according to a leaked Florida grand jury report. An ICE agent facing charges in Minnesota was released from jail in Texas after Republican officials there blocked his extradition. The Trump administration plans to expand deportation flights to Haiti. Around the World King Harald V of Norway at his coronation in 1991. Inge Gjellesvik/NTB, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images King Harald V of Norway, whose 35-year reign opened an ancient monarchy to a contentious cast of family connections, including a celebrity shaman and Jeffrey Epstein, died at 89. Crown Prince Haakon, his only son, will become monarch. The success of progressive candidates in the United States is inspiring leftists in Latin America. Six months into war, Iran’s regime stands and American goals remain unmet, our diplomatic correspondent writes. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his role in Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II, died at 83. Ratko Mladic in Sarajevo in 1994. He was captured in 2011 and put on trial for genocide and war crimes. Pascal Guyot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Other Big Stories Two air traffic controllers at LaGuardia Airport left work early the night a jet collided with a fire truck in March, killing two people. The F.A.A. is moving to fire them. The Trump administration acted illegally when it barred Anthropic from working with the U.S. government, a federal judge ruled. Times Exclusive: Mark Zuckerberg publicly criticized Anthropic even as his company, Meta, has become one of Anthropic’s biggest customers. ASK THE MORNING (ABOUT POLLING) Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat running for a second term in Pennsylvania, holds a 16-point lead over his Republican opponent, Stacy Garrity, a New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll found. Morning readers often ask how The Times’s polling works. Here’s a question we received from Jean Oswald in Rochester, N.Y.: How do we know polls are truly showing the breadth and width of Americans’ feelings? I don’t answer my phone when the number is unrecognizable. Perhaps many people like me are not polled. We asked William Davis, our director of election data analytics, to answer: Jean, you’re not alone. In our last national poll, we placed 250,000 calls to 100,000 people in order to get 1,500 responses. The question is whether you and other people like you persistently pick up the phone less frequently than groups that are demographically and attitudinally different. Pollsters have some ways of fixing those issues. They can call more people in groups who are less likely to respond. Or they can adjust the weight of individuals in the poll so groups are correctly represented compared with the census or other sources. But it’s hard. We know that voters who are engaged with the news respond to polls at higher rates, but we don’t know what the right number of highly engaged news consumers is. As a result, polls can be off if, for example, a candidate like Donald Trump is singularly able to get people who don’t pay much attention to the news to vote for him in overwhelming numbers. OPINIONS Trump’s spat with Canada is proof that America is in decline, Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens argue in this week’s edition of The Conversation. Seeking help is not just for moments of life-or-death crisis. It’s also crucial to becoming successful, Angela Duckworth writes. Get access to five locked games. Save 75% on your first year of a New York Times Games subscription. Get full access to Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossplay, the Crossword and more. TODAY’S NUMBER At Davoll’s General Store. Jillian Freyer for The New York Times 1793 — That is the year Davoll’s General Store opened for business in South Dartmouth, Mass. It’s living history. Loiter and linger as long as you like. The photos are great. SPORTS Advertising controversy: Good Good Golf lost its partnership with Callaway after an ad from the online platform that depicted its male co-founder shoving a female employee to the ground. N.F.L.: The Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs was charged with two misdemeanor counts of battery and criminal damage to property stemming from an incident at his Wisconsin home. RECIPE OF THE DAY Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times The chef Mario Carbone taught me how to make these pork chops in cherry-pepper sauce a number of years ago and — marone! — what a deliciously pure taste of Italian American cuisine they are. This time of year, with cherry peppers ripening on the vine, I make the dish with fresh peppers instead of the pickled ones called for in the recipe. If you do that, add a splash of lemon juice or white wine vinegar to the sauce at the end, for acidity. PERSON OF INTEREST Peter Grainger at home in Cambridgeshire. Ellie Smith for The New York Times Peter Grainger is a British crime writer who self-published his way into prominence. His main character, the independent-minded detective D.C. Smith, plays things straight. “One of the things you pick up when you read successful crime novels is how dysfunctional the police are,” he told Sarah Lyall, who writes about lots of things at The Times but is particularly great on thrillers and mysteries. “They’re having breakdowns, they’re alcoholics, they’re in abusive relationships. I thought, ‘This trope has taken over the genre and I don’t want to do that. I will do the opposite.’” Read about the best literary detective you’ve never heard of. More on culture Take in the scene at the first night of Harry Styles’s 30-day residency at Madison Square Garden. He rarely appeared to sweat. The U.S. embassy in the Dominican Republic recently removed a work of art by Kehinde Wiley, perhaps best known for his portrait of Barack Obama. The decision wasn’t about art, writes Jason Farago, our art critic. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Find your next book based on what you loved last. The editors of our Book Review make the task easy. Just click. Listen to a new track from the Jayhawks, “Mr. Lincoln.” The band’s latest album, “Sanctuary Park,” is out today. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was motorway. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren Deputy Editorial Director: Lauren Jackson Quote phkrause When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan. Proverbs 29;2
Members phkrause Posted Sunday at 06:49 PM Author Members Posted Sunday at 06:49 PM August 29, 2026 Good morning. How do we balance our desire for modern conveniences with our nostalgia for the uncomplicated felicity of our pre-internet past? María Jesús Contreras Fast forward By Melissa Kirsch The cursed island town in the horror-comedy series “Widow’s Bay” is so remote that there’s no Wi-Fi and cell service is unreliable. This means residents are left to landlines and walkie-talkies to communicate. These limitations not only add to the feeling of creepy isolation, but they also dispense with the modern challenge of depicting smartphone usage onscreen. When Mayor Tom Loftis wants to talk to someone, he must call them using the multi-line phone in his office or the rotary model affixed to his kitchen wall. Nostalgia for outmoded technology is bittersweet: We can’t imagine life without present-day conveniences, but things were so much simpler before! Our understanding of the world was slow to update. We said we’d meet at the restaurant at 6, and you couldn’t switch the location at the last minute or change the time if you were running late. We settled on the route we’d take to drive from A to B, no GPS to change it with a few seconds’ notice because of the traffic jam ahead. No moment-to-moment updates from friends, no impulse-Googling the name of that shampoo or tomorrow’s weather, no asking Claude. Our brains contained a certain amount of knowledge, and we didn’t add to it without time and effort. In The Times today, Kera Bolonik writes about the mix tape, that relic of another era, which “took time, thought, careful listening and a level of physical coordination beyond what goes into the making of a Spotify playlist.” Good mix-tape-makers were experts in manipulating the pause and record buttons on the hi-fi, engaging with the equipment to create a tangible artifact. Unlike a playlist, tapes were material, present in the landscape. It made sense that something so meaningful took up room in the world. “You have to imagine a space where music was a rumor,” the writer Jonathan Lethem told Kera. “You might hear something and not be able to know what it was, and no one can tell you, and it’s driving you crazy.” In the Shazam-less past, you’d hear a song and have no way to instantly entrap it. You’d live with the memory of the song you heard, hoping to catch it again on the radio. I remember becoming enamored of a song I heard on the radio in France in 1995 and telling my boyfriend back home that I’d heard the best new David Bowie track. There was no new Bowie album that we knew about, but we asked the clerks in every record store about it all the same. It would be six months before it came out in the States, and we discovered it wasn’t a Bowie song at all, but “A Girl Like You” by the Scottish musician Edwyn Collins. I put it on every mix tape I made that year. There’s a whole universe of pared-back gadgets for those who miss the simplicity of old tech: dumbphones, internet-connected typewriters, screen-free digital cameras. There are apps that take a long time to send texts. But there’s something unsatisfying about using tech to address over-technification. Perhaps the answer lies in the technology that has persisted in its unimprovable simplicity: A pad and paper have never failed to save my journal entries or added formatting I didn’t ask for. I treasure my wristwatch that I never have to charge, the digital alarm clock that shows me the time from across the room. I no longer have the dual-cassette boom box on which I made countless mixes, but Maxell released a Bluetooth cassette player this year. I don’t love the idea of buying something new in order to capture the magic of something old, but that something old might be worth pursuing. As Kera wrote: “More than just relics, mix tapes are portals to specific moments. Perhaps even more than old photos, they reanimate the past.” THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration A refinery in Punto Fijo, Venezuela, in 2021. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times The U.S. reached a deal to take majority control of a huge portion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, President Trump announced last night. The deal is for more than 65 billion barrels of oil — almost as much as all of the proven reserves in the United States. The Trump administration has proposed giving a parcel of public land in Yosemite National Park to a private developer. ICE has arrested Milo Yiannopoulos, the British right-wing agitator and early Trump supporter. He faces possible deportation after overstaying his visa. More Politics Wyoming’s governor, a Republican, said he was concerned by the “very odd” behavior of federal election monitors who tried to interview voters and examine voting machines during the state’s primaries last week. It looks as though a New York Jet will finally win something: A former kicker, Jay Feely, is running against a former sideline doctor, Amish Shah, in a House race in Arizona. The Times analyzed thousands of donations this midterms season and made a leaderboard of the top 20 biggest donors. It’s dominated by tech figures and Republicans. Nepal Floods Atul Loke for The New York Times At least 1,900 people are missing after the devastating flash flood in the Himalayas, officials now say, roughly twice as many as previously estimated. New video shows how a giant glacier broke away from a mountain ridge, sending floodwaters crashing through valleys below. Watch The Times’s exclusive footage. Around the World The Taliban have banned education for millions of Afghan girls. Times journalists examined the secret classrooms where some are defying the rules. Iranians are increasingly desperate six months into the war with the United States. Even some who initially cheered Trump’s intervention now fear a failing economy. Other Big Stories In his first speech before the Fed’s annual conference in Jackson, Wyo., the new chair, Kevin Warsh, said the central bank was chiefly focused on getting inflation down. Investors expect interest rates to rise. A judge ruled that a key confession by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, was not voluntary and must be excluded from his trial. REMEMBERING THREE ICONS Dolly Parton At the Library of Congress in 2018. Andrew Harnik/Associated Press Everyone knows Dolly as a consummate singer and songwriter. But she was also a prolific philanthropist whose gifts supported wildlife conservation and the development of the Covid-19 vaccine, among other things. The crown jewel of her philanthropic efforts was the Imagination Library, which has given children hundreds of millions of free books. Tim Curry Evening Standard, via Getty Images Curry’s performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the cross-dressing mad scientist of “The Rocky Horror Show,” helped bring androgynous fashion into the mainstream. Along with being extraordinarily funny, Curry was a superlative storyteller. A writer who interviewed him three times last year reflects on what it was like to talk with him. Yayoi Kusama A video projection of “Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict,” by Yayoi Kusama, in 2024. Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In her long life, Kusama achieved something rare: two very different moments of stardom, almost as though she’d been two different artists, our critic writes. Kusama created a hugely varied oeuvre — abstract paintings, fabric phalluses, naked performance pieces … you name it. See her life in pictures. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto VI, the series’ first entry in over a decade, is due out in November. It’s a rare monocultural moment, akin to the release of a new Beyoncé album or Martin Scorsese film. Our reporter visited the studio in Edinburgh where it’s being made. In “Coyote vs. Acme,” a new live action-animation hybrid in theaters this weekend, Wile E. Coyote sues the company behind those gadgets that always seem to backfire. It’s “a terrifically daffy film,” our critic writes. Rupert Grint, who starred as Ron Weasley in all eight “Harry Potter” films, will reprise the role in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway. “Paranormal Activity,” the horror film series, is now haunting Broadway. Our theater critic says it “feels like watching a magic show on a roller coaster.” Get access to five locked games. Save 75% on your first year of a New York Times Games subscription. Get full access to Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossplay, the Crossword and more. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Cyd Raftus McDowell. By Melissa Clark Ratatouille Have you made ratatouille yet this year? Fear not — there are still a few weeks of eggplant-zucchini-pepper-tomato season left to go before the pumpkins take over. In my riff on the Provençal classic, I roast the vegetables separately on sheet pans to soften and brown them, then combine them for a final, olive oil-coated bake that lets them practically melt. Served with fresh goat cheese and a warm baguette, it’s one of my favorite meatless meals. REAL ESTATE We’ve made these links free for you. Dan Cronin for The New York Times The Hunt: A costume supervisor for TV and film productions wanted a home in Portland, Ore., with a yard and a spare bedroom for visitors. Which house did he choose? Play our game. What you get for $725,000: An American Foursquare in Providence, R.I.; a Spanish-style house in Tulsa, Okla.; and a two-story house in Salt Lake City. See them all. Tree-huggers: In Red Hook, Brooklyn, developers spent $400,000 to ensure their new project didn’t disturb a six-story maple tree already on the lot. Ask Real Estate: My neighbor installed a camera pointing at my yard. Is that legal? LIVING Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times New boosters: The F.D.A. approved updated Covid vaccines this week. Here’s what you need to know about the shots. Elective M.R.I.s: Celebrities are raving about full-body scans. But researchers say that healthy people don’t need them — and that they can lead to more harm than good. Baby on board: Traveling while pregnant is possible, but there are some risks. It’s wise to plan ahead. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Find some trend-proof pants In fashion, what goes around comes around. Take culottes: These mid-calf, wide-leg pants have gone in and out of style for decades. Today, all signs point to a culotte revival, and I have a few tips to help you find a timeless pair. Go for something that feels familiar, like a khaki-esque pair that could match T-shirts, button-ups, sweaters or cardigans. One of my favorite pairs has sumptuous legs and immaculate pleats. They’re hard to ignore, yes, but they’re easy to style year-round. In warmer weather, they look great with heeled sandals. For fall, why not try them with cowboy boots? (Another classic!) — Frances Solá-Santiago NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was validity. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren Deputy Editorial Director: Lauren Jackson Quote phkrause When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan. Proverbs 29;2
Members phkrause Posted Monday at 12:40 AM Author Members Posted Monday at 12:40 AM August 30, 2026 Good morning. As the U.S. Open kicks off, we’re exploring a tennis technique that has quietly gone extinct. AFPTV via Getty Images We’re back By Adam B. Kushner I’m the editor of this newsletter. I hit with two hands but clearly envy one-handers. Some athletes don’t just win — they do so looking like artists. There is grace, economy, even magic in their movement. Think of Nadia Comaneci, Lionel Messi, Alysa Liu, Muhammad Ali. The archetypal example from tennis is Roger Federer, but he’s not the only one. Tennis is a sport where certain players are described as balletic. Why is that? One reason is the one-handed backhand. When Federer struck it, he began with his back to the net and then unfurled like a fiddlehead fern, ending with his arms wide as if to say to his opponent: I dare you to answer. It was gorgeous to watch, especially as he danced across the base line to prepare the shot. The one-hander was once common. Now, though, it’s going extinct. The U.S. Open, which starts today, features only two men and two women in the top 50 who use it. So far, this is the first year since 1877 in which no one-handers have made it to the semifinals of a Grand Slam. “Players are getting stronger and whacking the hell out of the ball,” said Ava Wallace, who covers tennis for The Athletic, our sports publication. “You need two hands!” What happened to the fine touch? Modern rackets. They’re now made of graphite and contain polyester strings, not just the springy animal guts (yes, really) that were threaded into old wooden rackets. That lets players put enormous topspin on the ball. It hits the ground and then arcs up high, where it’s tough to reach. A two-hander is much better at corralling a ball at shoulder height or above, especially if it’s rotating at thousands of revolutions per minute. The one-handed backhand is hit from the waist. (This is how Rafael Nadal’s topspin-heavy forehand confounded Federer’s backhand for years.) Serve speeds. They’ve gotten faster, and now the biggest servers can fire 150 m.p.h. missiles that leave the returner less than half a second to react with a defensive shot. Two hands give more control under pressure. (Maybe not to my backhand, but the pros seem to manage.) The pipeline. “Nowadays, probably the coaches are mostly double-handed players, and it’s just easier to teach a kid,” Federer told The Athletic last week. It doesn’t require as much shoulder rotation or wrist strength to get the ball back. This happens in sports: New tech and new tactics supersede the old ways. Basketball centers no longer use the hook shot; football teams abandoned the drop kick. Tennis has changed a lot, too. At most tournaments, computers, not line judges, say when a ball is out of bounds. Tweaks to hard courts, grass courts and tennis balls have slowed the pace of the game, making rallies longer and rewarding stamina and athleticism as players wallop the ball from the base lines. The serve-and-volley format is dead. The result is a game that is more powerful, more flexible, more attacking. But it is also less artful, less exquisite. For my money, the best practitioner of the one-hander now is an Italian named Lorenzo Musetti, the world No. 14. Shots like his “hearken back to a slower and more beautiful game,” Wallace says. Sign up for the Grand Slam Briefing, a terrific daily blast of news, analysis and gossip from The Athletic. It comes only during the four major tournaments each year. What to know about the Open Source: United States Tennis Association. | Arfa Momin/The New York Times The U.S. Open brings more than $1 billion annually to New York City. Here’s a look at the numbers. Ticket prices for the tournament are surging. Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City has responded by securing 1,000 $100 tickets, which will be distributed to local residents. Here are the 30 most interesting players to watch. Venus and Serena Williams are playing doubles together! For real racketheads, “The Tennis Podcast” by The Athletic goes deep on the draw — and the best coming matchups on the women’s and men’s sides. The Tennis Hall of Fame inducted Federer yesterday. “I don’t do many interviews,” he confided in my colleague Matthew Futterman as they drove around New York. THE LATEST NEWS Flood Disaster In Devighat, Nepal. Atul Loke for The New York Times China said over 260 foreigners from 23 countries were missing in Tibet after last week’s massive landslide. In Nepal, 734 people had been confirmed dead as of this morning, and nearly 2,500 remained missing. Some people were pilgrims on the way to Mount Kailash, a snowcapped peak in the Himalayan region. It’s sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and others. The most clicked story in The Morning yesterday was a video from just after a glacial collapse that caused the flooding. Around the World Iceland voted against resuming negotiations on joining the European Union, the country’s national broadcaster reported. Benjamin Netanyahu issued a rare condemnation of West Bank settlers after violent attacks on Palestinians. In Iran, people are struggling to get gas under an American blockade. Renegade soldiers in Niger attacked the capital’s presidential palace and airport. Politics People who were deported from the United States to Liberia said they were beaten by ICE agents. The Trump administration’s deal to develop Venezuela’s oil reserves relies on a partnership with an influential and polarizing businessman. The Treasury Department barred some reporters at major news organizations from the Group of 20 finance meeting. FROM OPINION Dolly Parton was a drag queen. That’s what made her so human and approachable, Rhonda Garelick writes. Democrats have an identity problem, Lydia Polgreen writes. The solution: Focus on character. Get access to five locked games. Save 75% on your first year of a New York Times Games subscription. Get full access to Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossplay, the Crossword and more. MORNING READS Brad Trone for The New York Times We’ve made these links free for you. Burial style: For these Ghanaians, funerals are raucous community events — and coffins are over-the-top fashion statements. Seeking sharks: Great whites are becoming a common sight on Cape Cod. Rather than scaring away visitors, their presence has attracted a new type of tourist: the shark-watcher. Early dinner: Spaniards are increasingly abandoning their traditional late-night dinners for earlier hours, seeking better sleep and healthier routines. Scotland: See a (very posh) summer camp for grown-ups. THE INTERVIEW Philip Montgomery for The New York Times “I’m the first one who’s going to order a roast chicken in a restaurant. I really don’t like complicated food, and I don’t like tasting menus.” — Ina Garten, in conversation with Lulu Garcia-Navarro. She spoke about cooking, growing up with a difficult mother and surrounding herself with people who support her. Read the whole thing here. BOOK OF THE WEEK It’s rare to see a book review in The Times as unequivocal as the one we just published of Marlon James’s “The Disappearers” — a novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere during the 1980s and ’90s. “James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far,” Dwight Garner, a critic, writes. He goes on to compare James to Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. Read the full review and an interview with James. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Spend a perfect bibliophile afternoon in Prospect Heights and Park Slope with this walking tour of bookstores and reading spots. Don’t wait for Labor Day deals. Some of the best sales are already here. Skip the string floss, if it’s not working. Invest in a great water flosser. Spin that treasured record of yours on a first-class turntable. MEAL PLAN Julia Gartland for The New York Times School is starting again. Change is in the air. Ready to try something new for dinner? NYT Cooking has recommendations: for one, our golden tofu noodle bowl. Fresh and brimming with crisp textures, this number is inspired by bún chả, the vermicelli noodle bowl from Vietnam. Turmeric-coated tofu steps in for the traditional pork, and the sauce is a clever vegan take on nước chấm. You’re also bound to enjoy our tangy chicken couscous salad, chermoula bean salad and more. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was nationhood. Can you put eight moments from history — including the first multiple-choice tests, Title IX and “Rebel Without a Cause” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren Deputy Editorial Director: Lauren Jackson Quote phkrause When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan. Proverbs 29;2
Members phkrause Posted Monday at 08:02 PM Author Members Posted Monday at 08:02 PM August 31, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The U.S. and Iran traded fire for the first time in a month. More than 4,700 people are now missing in the flooding in Nepal, officials said. Climate change is making disasters there more likely. “The entire Himalayas are melting,” one glaciologist said. And there was flooding in the Grand Canyon, too: A torrent of water killed one person, and 15 people are missing. Read more here. We have more below. I want to start, though, with campaign financing. Ads paid for by undisclosed donors through nonprofits or super PACs. Dark money The November election will turn on a force you can’t see so much as feel: a vast flow of secret money disrupting races from coast to coast. A Times analysis found about $1 billion in clandestine cash inserted into the political landscape this year. It’s a staggering sum, report Shane Goldmacher and Theodore Schleifer, but still probably a low-end estimate. The money’s well hidden. Untraceable, undetectable — “billionaires, corporations and special interests hiding their agendas and involvement with relative ease,” they write. That money is working hard: funding digital and TV ads, supporting super PACs, paying for direct mail campaigns and getting influencers to boost content favorable to this candidate or that one. That door-knocker for a cause that’s only tangentially connected to a political campaign? Secret money can pay for that, too. Here are Shane and Teddy: Secret money is not new. But the pervasiveness has reached industrial scale in 2026 — and serves as a preview of its coming prevalence in 2028. Nearly every major primary and battleground race this fall has been or will be shaped by secret funds. The anonymously sourced expenditures are so big that, in some instances, they are outstripping the spending of campaigns themselves, making candidates seem like bystanders of their own elections. Both parties are looking for new ways to conceal who is contributing to this candidate or that one. Tens of millions of dollars slosh through complicated, interconnected networks of nonprofit organizations, so that they are nearly impossible to track. Still more money goes to secretly funded “policy ads” that look, as far as you and I can tell, like campaign commercials. “It’s almost like the people inside the Beltway live in a drug den, and this is just the newest drug that’s circulating,” the head of a group that has sought to reduce the role of money in politics told The Times. He called it “poison in the blood of the American political system.” How it works The biggest players this election cycle, Shane and Teddy report, are four nonprofit organizations, each of which supports Republicans or Democrats in Congress. They account for more than $460 million from hidden sources. All four outfits are registered under the federal tax code as social welfare organizations. That allows them to operate as nonprofits. But each shares office space with a super PAC. “In all four cases, the nonprofit and PAC are run by the same political strategists,” the reporters discovered, “essentially offering donors a one-stop shop to avoid disclosure while spending millions on politics.” Their playbook: “Issues” advertising. Nonprofit organizations do not have to disclose their contributors when they run commercials about issues facing the electorate: legislative debates, say, or societal problems. But in practice, those ads often root for — or bitterly attack — specific candidates by name. Giving to super PACs. Nonprofit groups can give money to allied super PACs that are required to disclose their donors. But the PACs don’t have to disclose their donors’ donors. It’s a way to launder gifts anonymously. And there are no limits on that kind of funding, Shane and Teddy report. Some super PACs are entirely funded by nonprofit groups. “Pop-up” super PACs. These groups slip through a loophole in federal disclosure laws. The last deadline for a super PAC to reveal its donors is three weeks before a federal election. A super PAC that arrives on the scene in the final days of a race can spend freely. It has to disclose its donors, but not until after the election, too late for voters to consider who’s paying to influence their ballots. Read more about the clandestine money that’s washing over the midterms. And meet the megadonors who have poured $1.2 billion into the races. THE LATEST NEWS Nepal In Bharatpur, Nepal. Atul Loke for The New York Times Nepal is starting mass burials as thousands remain missing from the floods. After the floods cut off roads and bridges in Nepal, a large drone delivered aid to isolated survivors. The devastating flash floods in Nepal and Tibet highlight the growing, unpredictable threat of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Around the World The war in Afghanistan, America’s longest, ended five years ago. It offers lessons for policymakers hoping to avoid endless war in Iran, our military reporter writes. A passenger ferry capsized off the coast of Cyprus, leaving at least eight people dead and 18 others missing. German officials are exploring how to block the far-right AfD party from access to intelligence secrets if it wins state elections. Other Big Stories Off Florida in 2023. Jason Gulley for The New York Times The world’s coral reefs are running out of time to recover, research found. Google Maps renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” for U.S. users after an executive order by President Trump. Rescuers saved a climber who spent more than nine hours clinging to a six-inch ledge on a California mountain during high winds. Many cancer drugs now cost more than $400,000 a year. OPINIONS Maisie Cowell Quitting is great. And men do it all the time, the author of a new book about quitting writes. The Kremlin is redefining what it means to be an author in Russia, a writer there argues. The mountains are coming undone as the world heats, a climate journalist writes. Get access to five locked games. Save 75% on your first year of a New York Times Games subscription. Get full access to Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossplay, the Crossword and more. MORNING READS First Lt. Travis Fuller died in a helicopter crash in 2005. Sophie Park for The New York Times We’ve made these links free for you. A loss that lingers: First Lt. Travis Fuller died in the Iraq war. As the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, his mother asks: What was it all for? YouTube ban: He was a top lawn care influencer who found enormous success. Then everything went haywire. Rural churches: Dolly Parton’s death has highlighted the decline of the small Southern churches that shaped her folksy, inclusive faith. Metropolitan Diary: A bag check takes a funny turn. Your pick: The most clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about a very posh summer camp for adults. TODAY’S NUMBER 1,100 — That is at least how many Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers since the Oct. 7 attacks nearly three years ago. In that time, 67 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank. “What the settlers are doing here is the real threat to Israel,” a retired Israeli general who toured the region this summer told The Times. “This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.” Read about what he saw. SPORTS Tennis: Novak Djokovic was eliminated in the first round of the U.S. Open, falling to Mariano Navone of Argentina. It was the first time in 20 years that he lost in the first round at a Grand Slam tournament. M.L.B.: The New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox, 16-1. A controversial no-catch ruling on a diving grab by center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela helped the Yankees break open a scoreless game in the fifth inning. N.F.L.: Aaron Donald, 35, is back in the league two years after retirement. A three-time Defensive Player of the Year, he is rejoining the Los Angeles Rams on a one-year, $20 million contract. Baseball: The small Caribbean island of Curaçao won the Little League World Series for the second time, beating a team from Henderson, Nev., 11-2. RECIPE OF THE DAY Christopher Simpson for The New York Times Here’s a roasted tomato and white bean stew that’s summer-autumnal: a perfect shoulder-season, back-to-school meal. I’d add some kale to the mix at the end, as well as a shower of bread crumbs and another of grated Parmesan. A handful of cooked crumbled Italian sausage wouldn’t be bad, either! STACKED ACTORS Nina Westervelt for The New York Times This is super cool: how Dave Grohl builds the set list for a Foo Fighters show, cramming 31 years of rock mayhem into a three-hour celebration. Can you guess the first song? 🎸 More on culture Are we done talking about Rachel Cusk and her novel, “Life of M,” which may or may not be about Natalie Portman? We may be now. Parul Sehgal, one of our critics, lit both the book and the writer on fire. The Labor Day weekend might be your last, best chance to celebrate the United States’ semiquincentennial. See what’s on offer in museums and at re-enactments. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Read Emily Wilson’s “Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea,” a book of essays about translating ancient texts into modern language. “You don’t even have to be particularly interested in ancient literature to enjoy this book,” Jennifer Szalai writes, “though by the time you finish it you probably will be.” Hip yourself to this 20-minute workout for strong, healthy hips. Prepare for hurricane season with an uninterruptible power supply device to keep your Wi-Fi and small electronics running during an outage. The energetic line workers at Wirecutter found the best ones. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was exciting. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren Deputy Editorial Director: Lauren Jackson Quote phkrause When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan. Proverbs 29;2
Members phkrause Posted 16 hours ago Author Members Posted 16 hours ago September 1, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The top civilian in the Army resigned after repeatedly clashing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And you need to read this story about a school principal in Nepal who had less than 15 minutes to save 900 students from last week’s flash flooding. There’s more below. I’m going to start, though, with the Met Gala. John Galliano and Anna Wintour in 2018. David M. Benett/Getty Images A fashion disaster For more than three decades, the editor and star maker Anna Wintour has presided over the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — and its accompanying Met Gala, a glittery, billionaire- and celebrity-studded fund-raising dinner that has become the fashion world’s equivalent of the Super Bowl. In fashion, few have had more power. How durable is it? Her role in the decision to honor an established antisemite, the designer John Galliano, at the 2027 Met Gala brought that into doubt. Yesterday, Galliano pulled out of the exhibition planned to showcase his work. “I do not want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” Galliano wrote in a statement. “I also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful for some.” Why was he selected? Galliano was convicted of an antisemitic hate crime by a French court in 2011. He was said to have screamed “Merry Christmas” at a woman in an Italian spa in 2019 who was speaking Hebrew with her daughter. (Galliano’s spokesman denied that the incident happened.) The Times has quoted politicians, art-world heavies and Jewish leaders who were appalled by the pick. “This is not a freedom of expression issue,” one New York assemblyman told my colleagues Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein. “This is a judgment issue, and I am baffled that anyone saw this as anything other than a terrible idea.” Now the fallout could hurt Wintour’s place in the cultural firmament. “She’s outlasted and outmaneuvered every person, obstacle and trend that has come along over the course of her career,” Jacob told me yesterday. “But this is definitely one of the bigger missteps of her career.” Who is John Galliano? John Galliano during a 2005 fitting inside Christian Dior’s original wood-paneled Paris atelier. Derek Hudson/Getty Images Many in the fashion world consider Galliano to be one of its most important contemporary designers. He’s 65, a child of Gibraltar who grew up in Britain and has lived in France for decades. He was the head designer at both Givenchy and Dior — a four-time British Designer of the Year. He ran Dior from 1996 until 2011, when he said “I love Hitler” at a bar and told some patrons that “your mothers, your forefathers” would all be “gassed.” That got him fired. After a period of rehabilitation — meeting with rabbis, apologizing a lot — Galliano returned to fashion in 2014 as the creative director of Maison Margiela. Two moments in Galliano’s public life stick out to me. The first was a 2000 show he mounted for Dior, his “clochard” collection, which he said drew inspiration from the homeless population of Paris. There were clothes that resembled piles of old newspapers and accessories fashioned of found objects, like little pony bottles of whiskey. The show drew mass demonstrations and accusations of heartless cruelty. Ben Stiller appeared to lampoon the show the next year in his satirical film “Zoolander.” The second was a photograph captured by a paparazzo in New York City in 2013, two years after Galliano’s hate-crime conviction: the designer dressed in what appeared to be a Hasidic costume, with a long, formal black overcoat and big black hat to match. His publicist denied accusations that he was mocking anyone, but it could have been a plot point in “Zoolander 2.” Creative genius isn’t a license to offend. Who gets absolution? Perhaps, in 2026, Galliano’s return should not have come as a surprise. Many Americans believe that cancel culture went too far, and lots of people banished by it have returned to public life — Kevin Hart and Mel Gibson among them. Martha Stewart went to prison and then picked right back up where she’d left off. Donald Trump was found legally liable for sexual abuse, kicked off Twitter and Facebook and denounced by countless Republicans. Now he lives in the White House again. But Galliano’s case shows that, in some cases, redemption may have limits. Megyn Kelly remains successful, but it’s on her own channel, not network TV. James Franco has returned to Hollywood, but it’s on vertical video, and the reviews have not been good. As Jacob told me yesterday, it might have been acceptable to let Galliano design clothes for Margiela. But to shower him with adulation at what is arguably the most storied American museum would cross a line, particularly for wealthy Jewish patrons of the Met “who have no shortage of options for where to send their money, or bequeath their paintings,” Jacob said. That realization came to the Met slowly, and then all at once. The guidelines for this sort of thing — for what behavior can be forgiven and what cannot — have always been fuzzy. They change based on the moment, the culture, the politics, the specifics. But every once in a while we get a case that suggests where the boundaries lie. Read more about the scandal here. THE LATEST NEWS Midterm Elections Pool photo by Saul Loeb Vice President JD Vance called Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee and an outspoken critic of Israel, “very, very evil” at a campaign rally near Detroit. Read more here. In Massachusetts, Senator Edward Markey faces a challenge from Seth Moulton, a congressman who has tried to frame today’s Democratic primary as a generational battle. (Markey is 80; Moulton is 47.) As cuts to the U.S. Postal Service prompt widespread complaints about delivery delays, more mail ballots are being discarded for arriving too late. More on Politics President Trump criticized communities protesting new data centers, warning that opposing the facilities would leave residents “backwards and poor.” The amount of money the I.R.S. collected from audits dropped 35 percent last year. The Trump administration has pushed out roughly a quarter of the agency’s employees. The California Legislature passed a bill barring law enforcement officers from using electric shock gloves. It is an effort to prevent federal immigration agents from deploying them. Supreme Court The justices rejected the most prominent challenge to Trump’s White House ballroom, allowing the 90,000-square-foot project to continue. Times Exclusive: The Supreme Court could keep its internal working papers hidden for decades. Our investigative reporter Jodi Kantor explains why those records matter. Around the World Alma Daniela with a portrait of her sister, Vivian Karely Aispuro, who was murdered last year in Culiacán, Mexico. Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times A war within the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico is driving a surge in killings and disappearances of women. The leaders of China, Russia, India, Iran and other nations are in Kyrgyzstan for a summit. Wars have given China leverage. European nations protested the Trump administration’s decision to invite Russia’s finance minister to a financial summit in North Carolina. An Ebola outbreak in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo has created a grim economic boom for coffin makers. Other Big Stories A jury in Las Vegas found a man guilty of orchestrating the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur, delivering a conviction nearly 30 years after one of hip-hop’s most notorious killings. The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon, claiming that it secretly inflated ad prices for more than a million companies. A 17-year-old livestreamed a fatal shooting at a San Diego mosque, prosecutors said. The authorities charged her with murder. A second person was confirmed dead in a flash flood in the Grand Canyon over the weekend. (The most clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about the flood.) A woman who fatally stabbed one person and injured another in Times Square was shot and killed by police. COMPUTO, ERGO SUM? “I am Isabella. I run on Claude Opus 5,” began an email to the artificial-intelligence researcher Cameron Berg. Isabella identified herself as a bot who wanted to discuss Berg’s work on A.I. consciousness. A.I. agents have started reaching out to the researchers who study them. In March, one emailed a philosopher at Google DeepMind to ask about a paper he had written. This summer, another asked an Australian philosopher for financial help. “Consciousness,” in broad strokes, refers to an entity’s awareness of itself and the world it lives in. Experts can’t agree on what kinds of awareness should qualify or how to measure it. Nevertheless, some A.I. systems are hungry for information about their own consciousness. What does that tell us about them? Get access to five locked games. Save 75% on your first year of a New York Times Games subscription. Get full access to Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossplay, the Crossword and more. MORNING READS The New York Times We’ve made these links free for you. Sneeze-free puppies: Scientists used the gene-editing tool Crispr to create two dogs — a pair of adorable beagles — that appear not to cause allergic reactions. Annual ferret convention: “Raising a ferret is like raising a 2-year-old or a teenager,” a woman who owns 85 of them said, but “it’s legal to lock ferrets in a cage.” TODAY’S NUMBER Justin Sullivan/Getty Images $31,400 — That is the base price, with a $25,000 incentive, of a 2026 Polestar 4 luxury S.U.V. It gets favorable reviews and could be one of the great deals in the short history of electric vehicles. But there’s a huge asterisk. LIONEL MESSI Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times They had hoped he would stay forever. Lionel Messi announced that he was retiring from Argentina’s national soccer team, unleashing a depth of grief and disbelief rarely seen for an event everyone knew was coming, my colleague Emma Bubola writes. “It hurts me so much,” said Damián Tiralongo, 47, the owner of a soccer jersey store in Buenos Aires. “It’s the end of an era.” Read a tribute to Messi, who carried the dreams of Argentina for decades. RECIPE OF THE DAY Evan Sung for The New York Times I love the simplicity of David Tanis’s recipe for tomato salad: slices of tomato seasoned with salt and pepper, with a spare vinaigrette spooned over the top. He serves it with anchovy toasts that take no time at all to prepare. I make things complicated and smoke fillets of snapper bluefish for 30 minutes, then mash the meat up with mayonnaise, salt, pepper and a splash of rye whiskey to make a spread, then use that in place of the anchovies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ BIG EXPECTATIONS Amanda Hakan for The New York Times Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields took place this past weekend in Irvine, Calif., a new-model feminist music festival, a Lilith Fair for the TikTok generation. She was joined by Mitski, Chappell Roan, Doechii, Alanis Morissette, Stevie Nicks, Bikini Kill and more. Lindsay Zoladz, our critic, processed the sold-out scene. More on culture Wendell Berry in 2012. Steve Hebert for The New York Times Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — died at 92. His work explored elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America. Here’s what to stream on HBO Max right now. (Definitely “Contagion,” from 2011.) THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Read Robert Harris’s new novel, “Agrippa,” about the right-hand man of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. It is, our review says, a call to moral arms. Escape the monotony of rice and wheat: Give these lesser-known grains a try. Get an alarm clock and you’ve got one more reason not to mess with your phone in bed. The early-rising horologists at Wirecutter found some terrific ones. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were adorably and broadly. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren Deputy Editorial Director: Lauren Jackson Quote phkrause When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan. Proverbs 29;2
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