Members phkrause Posted February 1, 2025 Author Members Posted February 1, 2025 February 1, 2025 By Melissa Kirsch Good morning. On the first day of February, consider a monthly intention-setting ritual, even if you think you don’t have a minute to spare. María Jesús Contreras Renewed resolve There’s this lovely newsletter called The Moon Lists that arrives in my inbox sporadically, always just when I need it. It’s a list of prompts, topics for journaling, ideas for reconsidering how you’re living or not living. One prompt from a recent dispatch: “PHANTOM LIMB: Name something you miss but — if offered — you don’t actually want back.” A curious provocation! Missing without longing, a new way of considering the things and people and ideas we leave behind. People have taken in recent years to posting “More/Less” lists and “In/Out” lists on social media at the end of the year, itemized declarations of things they’re going to embrace and eschew in the coming months. Take inventory: What stays, what goes? The Moon Lists’ version of this is “Away/Toward” lists, and for the past couple of years I’ve loved filling these out. What am I moving away from (gorgeous but sad acoustic folk music that inevitably leaves me feeling depressed; diseased houseplants) and what am I moving toward (lowering the stakes; abbondanza!). The problem so often with these lists is that you fill them out and then you forget them. You set intentions and then you get back to going about things unintentionally and the next thing you know it’s February and your well-considered plans are buried in a drawer. What if these New Year traditions became New Month traditions? What if we started each month with an Away/Toward list or a Yes/No list or a Loving/Losing list and kept it front and center all month, stayed accountable? What if, today, Feb. 1, you scrawled down a few things you want more of and a few things you want less of and set a couple of alerts in your phone to remind you to look at it throughout the month, and maybe set aside a half an hour on Feb. 28 to assess how you did? A lightweight ritual. An experiment for the month that reminds you at intervals that the project of living is not just the business you have to carry out day to day. It’s not just the things to be done or the headlines or the weekend plans or the future and its endless what-ifs. It’s also — maybe principally? — you, an interior process, who you are and who you’d like to be and how are you doing in your efforts at being and becoming that? So soft, right? So self-helpy, and maybe you’re reading this on a particularly busy or stressful Saturday morning when you have things to do — who even has the time for this? Maybe you already have practices that remind you of your larger goals, or you never forget them in the first place. But if you are anything like me, underneath the rational voice that just wants to accomplish, you’re craving a little more ritual, something brief and self-contained that for a moment derails the inexhaustible locomotive of living and reminds us we’re still here, people with desires and ambitions and complicated hopes and tender needs that we’re always forgetting to check in on. For more “Rituals often mark doorway moments, when we pass from one stage of life to another. They acknowledge that these passages are not just external changes but involve internal transformation.” David Brooks on why there should be more rituals. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV The best actress nominees, clockwise from top left: Karla Sofía Gascón, Demi Moore, Mikey Madison, Cynthia Erivo and Fernanda Torres. Clockwise from top left: Shanna Besson/Netflix; Mubi; Neon; Universal Pictures; Alile Onawale, via Sony Pictures Classics For the first time since 1978, all five nominees for best actress at the Oscars come from films also nominated for best picture. It’s proof that this is the strongest best actress lineup in years, our awards columnist writes. “Atropia,” a satire about performers playacting war with American troops, won the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival. “Love Me,” an inventive techno-romance starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, is one of five new movies our critics are talking about this week. We rarely see rom-com heroines age. In her own messy way, the character of Bridget Jones — who is returning in a new movie — is a trailblazer, Esther Zuckerman writes. Chuck Todd, the former “Meet the Press” moderator, is leaving NBC after nearly two decades with the network. Music At 85, the renowned conductor Marek Janowski is finally making his New York Philharmonic debut. Only three Black women have won album of the year at the Grammys. On Sunday, Beyoncé will, once again, try to become the fourth. Billie Eilish’s album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is nominated for seven Grammys. She shared the albums, movies and even video games that inspired its creation. More Culture “Onyx Storm,” the third book in Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series, is the fastest-selling adult fiction title of the past 20 years. The Louvre will move the Mona Lisa to a newly created exhibition space as part of the museum’s renovation plans, Emmanuel Macron announced. Idina Menzel is returning to Broadway in “Redwood,” a show about a grieving woman’s search for sanctuary. The Smithsonian announced it would close its diversity office and freeze hiring to comply with President Trump’s recent orders. THE LATEST NEWS Trump’s Tariffs The Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Canada, on Friday. Ian Willms for The New York Times President Trump’s tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada and China are set to go into effect today. Goods from Mexico and Canada will be subject to 25 percent tariffs, and those from China 10 percent. Experts predict the tariffs will be bad news for North America’s economy. More than half of the crude oil the U.S. imports comes from Canada. The tariffs could cause gas prices to rise. More on the Trump Administration The Trump administration plans to examine thousands of F.B.I. agents involved in Jan. 6 investigations. It could lead to a purge of rank-and-file agents. The Justice Department fired more than a dozen prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who had been hired to investigate the Jan. 6 riot. “Everyone’s walking on eggshells”: Federal health agencies rushed to remove references to equity and gender from databases and websites. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he would divest his stake in lawsuits over an HPV vaccine and give the proceeds to his son. Trump froze billions in international aid. The decision is already worsening humanitarian crises, including one in Sudan, where soup kitchens that serve nearly a million people have shut down. Plane Collision Crews have recovered the so-called black boxes from the Army helicopter and the passenger jet that collided over the Potomac River. The data inside could help explain how the two aircraft collided. At the time of the crash, the flight tower at Ronald Reagan National Airport was understaffed. It’s a chronic problem: More than 90 percent of the country’s air traffic control facilities operate below the F.A.A.’s recommended staffing levels. There had been at least 10 close calls at Reagan National in recent years. Other Big Stories A small medical plane carrying six people crashed in Philadelphia, engulfing vehicles and homes in flames. Officials believe everyone on board was killed. Gaza’s border with Egypt is reopening to allow sick and wounded Palestinians to leave the territory. The crossing had been closed for the past eight months. Hamas released three more hostages. One is an American citizen, Keith Siegel, who lived on a kibbutz near the Gaza border. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year. CULTURE CALENDAR By Desiree Ibekwe ? “Companion” (out now): A movie produced by the team behind the delightfully unhinged horror “Barbarian,” starring Jack Quaid and about the perils of technology? Sold. This dark comedy is about a couple — Iris and Josh — who get away for the weekend with friends. A tip: There’s a twist at some point in the film, so Quaid suggests not watching the full trailer. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Linda Xiao for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Mushroom Barley Soup Chilly February days keep me close to the kitchen, which is easily the coziest room in the house. Simmering a pot of Yasmin Fahr’s mushroom barley soup gives you a perfect excuse to hang out there, chopping, cooking, then letting the mix slowly bubble on the stove. It’s on the lighter, brothier side of the soup spectrum, but the starch from the barley gives it body and a satisfyingly nubby texture, ready to warm you through and through. REAL ESTATE Jeremy Turous and Harper Luke with their dog, Copper. Brian Kaiser for The New York Times The Hunt: After a year in Japan, a couple wanted to return to Columbus, Ohio. They bought a home from 10 time zones away. Which one did they choose? Play our game. D.I.Y.: Drilling holes in the wall can be scary. Here’s how to hang anything, without fear. What you get for $240,000: A colonial-style house in North Adams, Mass.; a three-story brick house in Pittsburgh; or a 1930 rowhouse in Baltimore. LIVING Francis Kokoroko for The New York Times Travel: Spend 36 hours in Accra, Ghana. Health: Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have had many other, unexpected benefits. Scientists are studying whether they can protect against Alzheimer’s. In the garden: A bird’s guide to surviving winter. High art: Modern weed paraphernalia looks so cool, you won’t mind leaving it on the coffee table. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER The best timeless jewelry Over the years, Wirecutter’s experts have recommended hundreds of rings, bracelets, necklaces and earrings. Tastes vary and trends come and go, but if you’re looking to give someone a piece of jewelry, it’s hard to go wrong with something classic, like a signet ring or a curb chain. We’ve happily gifted or worn each of these sparkly pieces ourselves. And while none are holiday-specific, if you’re searching with a valentine in mind, we think a heart locket is a good choice. — Samantha Schoech For more handpicked gifts and expert advice, sign up for Wirecutter’s weekly newsletter, The Gift. GAME OF THE WEEK Ven-Allen Lubin of North Carolina and Cooper Flagg of Duke. Grant Halverson/Getty Images, Dale Zanine/USA TODAY Sports, via Reuters North Carolina vs. No. 2 Duke, men’s college basketball: As the college basketball season ramps up to March Madness, Duke is setting itself apart. The Blue Devils have won 14 straight games. Their star forward, Cooper Flagg, isn’t just the best freshman in the country; he might be the best player at any age. Over seven games in January, he averaged 25 points, 8 rebounds and 5 assists. That included a 42-point explosion against Notre Dame, a record for a Duke freshman. Today at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on ESPN NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were additional and dilation. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 2, 2025 Author Members Posted February 2, 2025 February 2, 2025 Good morning. Today, we’ve got a primer on the newcomers at tonight’s Grammy Awards. We’re also covering Trump’s tariffs, religion and phone addictions. In with the new By Desiree Ibekwe I’m a writer for The Morning. There is something exciting about the best new artist award at the Grammys. It is, by its nature, celebrating the fresh and, sometimes, the novel. Some of the nominees are sweetly green, while others have toiled for years without piercing the mainstream. All seem thrilled to be nominated. The award can be a kind of musical crystal ball, a hint at musicians who will come to flourish in the industry. (Past winners include Sade, Alicia Keys and Adele.) And it is also a way for audiences to discover newer artists, like the jazz singer Samara Joy, whose 2023 win gave her career a boost. Each nominee tells us a story — about the past year in music and the direction of music more generally. So, here are three things to know about the category ahead of the ceremony tonight. Breakthroughs Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times, Fletcher Moore for The New York Times When, in years to come, people are asked about pop music in the 2020s, the names Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are likely to come to mind. So rapid was Roan’s rise that the venues her team booked the year before her tour could not accommodate her fans. And so ubiquitous was Sabrina Carpenter’s criminally catchy “Espresso” that it prompted conspiracy theories about the Spotify algorithm. Their successes were a long time coming: Carpenter, a former Disney child star, released her sixth album last year. And Atlantic Records first signed Roan, 26, when she was just 17. There are many such cases in the best new artist category. At least three other nominees — the British singer Raye, the country artist Shaboozey and the band Khruangbin — have been releasing music for a decade or more. A “breakthrough in public consciousness,” as the Recording Academy puts it in the eligibility requirements, appears to have little to do with how long someone has been making music. At the start of last year, Carpenter and Roan were members of what Shaad D’Souza described in The Times as pop music’s middle class: Artists beloved in some corners of the internet but for whom commercial success remained elusive. No longer. “Espresso” was the most streamed song in the world on Spotify last year, and their cultural impact ran deep enough to warrant each her own “Saturday Night Live” parody. (They’re nominated for six Grammys each.) Star ascendant Doechii Getty Images Another one of the nominees, Doechii, a 26-year-old rapper and singer from Florida, may very well experience a similar ascendancy in 2025. “The year ahead for her is going to be huge,” my colleague Lindsay Zoladz, a music critic, told me. That’s great news for her career, though maybe not so good for her chances of winning the Grammy, considering that Roan and Carpenter are the favorites. It’s easy to see why audiences are drawn to her. Last year, Doechii released her (very good) mixtape “Alligator Bites Never Heal,” which is by turns buttery, grimy, vulnerable and self-possessed. Fans have emulated her distinctive “Swamp Princess” aesthetic. Millions have watched and shared her theatrical performances on NPR’s Tiny Desk and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” And Kendrick Lamar praised her as “the hardest out.” Her path to fame — she parlayed a viral TikTok song into critically lauded success — is a model for the modern music business. Doechii announced that she would release an album sometime this year, telling Variety: “I’m just looking forward to making more hits.” A wider tent Shaboozey Mike Mulholland/Getty Images The nomination of Shaboozey, the Nigerian American country-singer-slash-rapper, is, on one level, a straightforward recognition of the success of his song “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which spent a record 19 weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 list. But it’s also symbolic of a year in which country music continued to cross into the mainstream and encompass different kinds of artists. The Times critic Jon Pareles wrote that 2024 was “a year in which country culture has become palpably ubiquitous.” Post Malone took a country turn on “F-1 Trillion,” and Beyoncé tapped country artists and influences for her album “Cowboy Carter.” The Beyoncé album cast a glow: She boosted streaming numbers for the Black country artists featured on her album, including Shaboozey, and raised the genre’s profile. “Beyoncé’s album helped — it was for the betterment of country music,” the country singer Ernest told The Times. I didn’t mention all the nominees for best new artist (you can find them here), but the competition is stiff. “I think it’s an especially strong year for best new artist,” Lindsay told me. “There are five to six different nominees that in another year could have won.” For more Lindsay’s newsletter, The Amplifier, has a playlist where you can hear songs by all eight best new artist nominees. The Times’s pop music team discussed the snubs and surprises of this year’s nominations. Read the conversation. THE LATEST NEWS Trump’s Tariffs In Windsor, Canada. Ian Willms for The New York Times President Trump imposed tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico. He seems uninterested in negotiating deals, David Sanger writes. China responded cautiously to Trump’s tariff announcement. Beijing wants to avoid an escalation. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announced retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. He said it was reluctant: “We didn’t ask for this.” Soft power is out and hard power is in, Peter Baker writes. Trump is using tariffs to coerce other countries to do what he wants. Tariffs could lead to higher prices for consumers. Read what to expect. More on Politics The Pentagon is removing dedicated office space from four major news organizations, including The New York Times and NPR, to make room for right-wing outlets like Breitbart News and One America News. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is visiting Panama. It’s a tense visit because Trump has threatened to seize the Panama Canal. The U.S. Agency for International Development’s website went dark. Lawmakers and aid workers are worried that Trump may shut down the agency. The C.D.C. ordered its scientists to withdraw any pending publications that mention terms such as “transgender,” “immigrant” or “L.G.B.T.” Other Big Stories In Prayagraj, India. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using a religious festival, considered the world’s largest gathering, as a platform to promote his political achievements and Hindu traditions. Hamas freed three hostages and Israel released 183 Palestinian prisoners as part of a cease-fire deal. The exchange proceeded smoothly, unlike a previous one. The F.D.A. issued its most severe recall for some chocolate- and yogurt-covered products because of unlisted ingredients that could be deadly for people with allergies. The crash of a medical transport plane in Northeast Philadelphia that killed seven left a neighborhood shaken. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Should the Gulf of Mexico be called the Gulf of America? No. The president has better things to spend energy on. “I mean, the Atlantic Ocean borders our nation’s entire East Coast, so why not change that to ‘East American Ocean?’” Florida Today’s John Torres writes. Yes. Trump’s decision to change the name signals America comes first. “If he starts calling the body of water down by Florida and Texas ‘the Gulf of America’ and Republican politicians go along with it, it could stick,” The Arizona Republic’s Greg Moore writes. FROM OPINION American voters may have given Trump the power to push forward his agenda, but he must do so legally, the Editorial Board writes. Throw away your smartphone, August Lamm writes. Ross Douthat writes that Americans have a striking nostalgia for belief. He wants to help you pick a religion, if you’re looking. Here’s a column by Nicholas Kristof on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year. MORNING READS Photo illustration by Ben Denzer The ‘manosphere’: The assertion of men’s interests in American culture ebbs and flows in response to feminism. In the name of science: Since the pandemic, drug trials that intentionally make people sick have become a growing area of interest. All that’s needed: brave volunteers. Overlooked: She broke barriers at NASA and contributed to its earliest space missions as a rocket scientist. Vows: They escaped the “demoralizing” New York dating scene. Lives Lived: Suzanne Massie was neither an academic Russia expert nor a diplomat. But she coached President Ronald Reagan ahead of his high-wire summitry with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. She died at 94. BOOK(S) OF THE WEEK By Elisabeth Egan “Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old” by Brooke Shields, and “Dare I Say It?” by Naomi Watts: Like old friends who can’t be bothered with competition or pretense, these new best-sellers are best enjoyed together. In fact, Watts even makes a cameo in Shields’s convivial memoir of reaching a certain age and embracing the wisdom she’s earned. Both authors explore the same terrain — menopause, aging and the power that comes with experience. But Shields takes a first-person approach (letting it all hang out, in the best way), while Watts goes in a more prescriptive direction, weighing in (with the advice of experts) on sleep challenges, physical changes and other realities for women in midlife. Worth noting: Shields and Watts both have beauty brands geared toward their demographic, but their books are in no way promotional. And they share a similar message for sisters in arms: Hold your people close, especially the ones with a sense of humor. More on Books Read your way through New York City, with Jennifer Egan, Casey McQuiston, Ayad Akhtar and other literary luminaries. Bill Gates’s first memoir and a Booker Prize nominee: See 20 books coming this month. THE INTERVIEW Dr. Anna Lembke Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By Lulu Garcia-Navarro This week’s subject for The Interview is Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction specialist at Stanford. Lembke, who wrote the best-selling book “Dopamine Nation,” works with patients dealing with all sorts of addictions, from opioids and alcohol to what she calls “digital drugs.” We spoke about what she’s seen in her practice, and life, over the past few years. We’ve all become extremely attached to our phones. And phones do seem like the gateway to a lot of these new addictive behaviors. Online sports betting has exploded; pornography use, as you mentioned, is up even as actual sex is down. I was reading a study that said in 2024, Gen Z spent six to seven hours a day scrolling, on average. So I guess it seems that it’s more a systemic problem than an individual problem. I agree 100 percent. This is a collective problem. I see it as part of the Anthropocene, which is a term that’s been coined to describe the age we live in now, when human action is changing the face of the planet for the first time in history. Climate change is often included in this idea of the Anthropocene. But I think that the stressors of overabundance should also be included in that. In the richest countries in the world, we have more leisure time, more disposable income, more access to leisure goods than ever before. And as a result, we are all struggling to know what to do with all that extra time and money. And one would hope and think that we would be engaging in deep philosophical discussions, helping each other— Sorry, I’m laughing. But instead what we’re doing is spending a whole lot of time masturbating, shopping and watching other people do things online. And essentially what’s happened is we’re spending more and more of our energy and creativity investing in this online world, which means that we are actually leaching our real-life existence of our energy and creativity. So when we try to re-enter the real world, it actually is more boring, because there’s less going on, because there’s nobody there. Read more of the interview here. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New York Times Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Travel better with babies and toddlers. Enjoy these classical music albums. Use an eyeliner pen. MEAL PLAN Christopher Testani for The New York Times In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein suggests making roasted tofu and green beans with chile crisp, a one-pan crispy chicken and chickpeas, and salmon with avocado and cilantro salad. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was bottleful. Can you put eight historical events — including Kant’s philosophy, the exploration of Mars, and the creation of “The Star-Spangled Banner” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 3, 2025 Author Members Posted February 3, 2025 February 3, 2025 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering the potential impacts of Trump’s tariffs. We’re also covering Venezuelan immigration, government websites and the Grammy Awards. In Detroit. Brittany Greeson for The New York Times Tit for tat Out of the many tariffs that President Trump promised on the campaign trail, those he announced over the weekend are the most likely to affect U.S. consumers. The three countries he targeted — Canada, China and Mexico — are America’s biggest trade partners, making up about four in 10 U.S. imports. The tariffs, up to 25 percent on Canada and Mexico and 10 percent on China, have shaken markets and angered allies. They will also likely raise prices on these countries’ goods, including gasoline, avocados and car parts. (See what prices could rise.) Source: Census Bureau | Countries with at least a 2 percent share in 2024, through November, are shown, accounting for about three-quarters of imports. | By The New York Times Canada, China and Mexico have promised to retaliate. Leaders said that they didn’t want a trade war but that they felt forced to act. Canada announced 25 percent tariffs on U.S. products to match Trump’s. They target goods like American-made honey, tomatoes and whiskey. Mexico said it would impose retaliatory tariffs, too. China said that it would file a case against the United States at the World Trade Organization and take “corresponding countermeasures.” Today’s newsletter will look at Trump’s goals for tariffs and what could come next. Trump’s goals Why has Trump imposed tariffs? He and his allies have offered three main explanations. 1. National security: Trump has argued the tariffs address national security concerns. China is a major geopolitical rival, and Trump says Canada and Mexico haven’t done enough to curb illegal immigration and drug trafficking. 2. Competition: Trump has said tariffs could make American manufacturers more competitive. U.S. products are typically more expensive than those from other countries, a result of higher labor costs and stricter regulations. Tariffs could help level the playing field. 3. Revenue: The tariffs, which are effectively taxes on foreign goods, will raise government revenue. Trump has often spoken favorably of tariffs for this reason, as my colleague David Sanger explained. Trump has suggested that tariffs can help reduce or replace income taxes. The case against tariffs Economists on the left and the right are particularly skeptical of the second and third claims. While tariffs can help level the playing field, they can also lead to a trade war. Retaliatory tariffs and a stronger dollar could cause American manufacturers to lose business because their products would become more expensive, and less desirable, internationally. And the money raised by these tariffs amounts to just 2 percent of federal revenues. The prospect of higher prices has made some of Trump’s Republican allies critical of his actions, although most stayed silent. “We won the last election by complaining about Democrats’ policies, which gave us high prices,” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky wrote. “Tariff lovers will be forced to explain the persistence of high prices.” Companies passed the cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on to American consumers, studies found. Poor and middle-class Americans stand to feel the effects more because the day-to-day stuff they buy represents a bigger share of their income. The case for tariffs Trump’s defenders, including his top economist, argue that his critics overestimate the negative effects of tariffs. They say that markets will adjust and that other policies can mitigate bad outcomes. When Trump imposed tariffs during his first term, some suppliers in China cut their prices to offset part of the cost. Trump’s allies also say that imports from Canada, China, and Mexico are too small, at only 5 percent of the U.S. economy, for tariffs on them to seriously hurt Americans. Meanwhile, U.S. exports to Canada and Mexico make up a larger share — around 15 to 20 percent — of those countries’ economies. So they could suffer more from a trade war and capitulate to Trump’s demands. Uncertain future A major question remains: Will Trump leave his tariffs in place for long? Some of Trump’s allies have suggested that he will use the threat of tariffs as a negotiating tactic. If Trump just wants Canada and Mexico to do more on illegal immigration and drug trafficking, he may have imposed these tariffs only to show that he’s serious about national security. Once the three countries negotiate, Trump may rescind the tariffs. Still, Canada and Mexico already cooperate with the United States on immigration and drug trafficking, and illegal immigration and overdose deaths fell in the last year. Trump has yet to explain what, specifically, he would like America’s neighbors to do. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, said he had tried to reach out to Trump since Inauguration Day but had not heard back. If Trump cares more about his other goals — American manufacturing and revenue — then the tariffs need to remain in place to achieve their main objectives. The permanent outcome is the most likely to hurt American consumers. In the short term, companies might eat the cost of tariffs that they believe to be temporary to avoid disrupting consumer demand for their products. But if they believe the tariffs are permanent, companies are more likely to pass the costs on to consumers through higher prices. As a result, you could pay more at the pump, the grocery store and the car dealership. International response Asian and European stock markets fell. The tariffs threaten to upend the global economic order. While they hurt China, they also give Beijing diplomatic opportunities. More countries, including America’s closest allies, are creating their own economic partnerships without the United States. The premier of British Columbia announced that the province would stop sales of alcohol produced in red states. More news Trump defended the tariffs while acknowledging that there could be negative consequences. “WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!),” he wrote on social media. American home builders, retailers and alcohol producers said they worried their costs would go up — and so would prices. Trump also ordered an end to the ability of Americans to buy up to $800 of goods per day from each country without paying tariffs. That’s a blow to online stores like Temu and Shein that ship directly from factories in China. American law enforcement officials have blamed duty-free shipments for allowing fentanyl into the U.S. because the shipments receive little or no inspection by customs agents. THE LATEST NEWS Politics A woman from Venezuela with her daughters in Denver. Jimena Peck for The New York Times The Trump administration revoked Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. The move puts them at risk of deportation in coming months. The two top security officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development were put on leave after refusing to give representatives of Elon Musk access to internal systems. More than 8,000 government web pages have been taken down since Friday afternoon, a New York Times analysis found. “We have no coherent message”: Democrats are struggling to oppose Trump. International In Novi Sad, Serbia. Nenad Mihajlovic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A deadly railway station collapse has prompted months of large protests in Serbia. The governing party criticized the state-controlled broadcaster for covering them. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Panama and escalated the confrontation over the Panama Canal. He accused the country of letting China control it. Plane Crash A makeshift memorial in Washington. Kent Nishimura for The New York Times Emergency crews have recovered most of the bodies from last week’s midair crash in Washington. Officials believe it killed 67 people. They plan to lift the wreckage of the jet involved out of the Potomac River today. The jet, an American Airlines flight, turned upward shortly before the crash. Read what we know. The Army identified the co-pilot of the helicopter in the crash. The airspace around the capital is difficult to navigate. See maps. Other Big Stories OpenAI released Deep Research, an A.I. tool that can gather information from across the internet and synthesize it in concise reports. A professional rope jumper rescued a teenager who fell through thin ice in Indiana. He used his jump rope in the rescue. Opinions Trump wants to remove highly qualified service members because they are transgender. He will weaken the military as a result, Bree Fram, a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, writes. Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Trump’s first two weeks. Here is a column by David French on Kash Patel. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year. MORNING READS Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times Ozempic: Weight-loss drugs can upend a marriage. Read one couple’s experience. See Lucy run: Our early human ancestor was capable of running, if slowly, a new study finds. Ethicist: “I’m happily married. I just want to sleep with another man before I die.” Metropolitan Diary: Exchanging smiles in the dark. It’s Black History Month: Read about its origins. Most clicked yesterday: An Opinion article telling you how to give up your smartphone. Lives Lived: Millicent Dillon was a novelist and prizewinning short-story writer, best known for nonfiction that chronicled an eccentric literary couple. She died at 99. SPORTS Women’s college basketball: Iowa retired Caitlin Clark’s jersey just after a huge upset of No. 4 U.S.C. N.B.A.: The Kings sent their star guard De’Aaron Fox to the Spurs in a three-team trade. N.F.L.: The Raiders hired Ohio State’s offensive coordinator, Chip Kelly, in the same role. ARTS AND IDEAS Beyoncé Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy At the Grammy Awards, Beyoncé won album of the year for “Cowboy Carter,” and she became the first Black artist to win best country album. Kendrick Lamar won five Grammys, including song and record of the year for “Not Like Us,” and Chappell Roan was named best new artist. Doechii and Sabrina Carpenter also won awards. See the winners. President Jimmy Carter won a posthumous Grammy for a spoken-word album, “Last Sundays in Plains.” Most Grammy parties were canceled because of the fires. Some went ahead as fund-raisers. Taylor Swift, despite numerous Grammy victories, has yet to win record or song of the year. More on culture From Gaurav Gupta’s collection. Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times See the best outfits from couture week in Paris. People are using cannabis paraphernalia as home décor. The word to describe this year’s Sundance Film Festival is “weird,” a Times critic writes. Read about the festival. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Ryan Liebe for The New York Times Add kimchi to your breakfast sandwich for a jolt of heat and brightness. Consider a shampoo bar. Find a great pair of leggings. Declutter your fridge. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were guardian and guarding. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 4, 2025 Author Members Posted February 4, 2025 February 4, 2025 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering a new report on the state of America — as well as Trump’s tariffs, Gaza and “The Simpsons.” John Taggart for The New York Times Wealthy and unhappy Like many other Americans, Douglas Harris — an economist at Tulane University — has found himself worrying about the quality of public discourse. It is full of misinformation, cynicism and polarization. Americans seem irrationally angry about the country’s condition and can’t even seem to agree on basic facts. Harris decided to do something about the situation in 2021. He recruited a politically diverse committee of experts to study the true state of the nation. He persuaded 13 other scholars — who together have advised each of the past five presidents, stretching back to Bill Clinton — to do so. They released their national report card yesterday. It finds that the U.S. economy is performing better than any of its peers and pulling away from the economies of Europe and Japan. The U.S. remains far richer, per person, than China or India. Sources: State of the Nation report, World Bank The report also finds that the U.S. fares less well in almost every other realm, including health, happiness and social trust. Source: State of the Nation report, UNICEF, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, World Bank, Gallup World Poll “We’re so wealthy but so unhappy,” said Bradley Birzer, a member of the committee and a historian at Hillsdale College in Michigan. In the end, the experts decided that 37 measures were important enough to list, including those covering economic output, employment, income inequality, life expectancy, environmental conditions, depression, community involvement, press freedom and voter turnout. For a measure to make the list, roughly 75 percent of the experts had to agree on its inclusion. The group also commissioned a poll and found that a large majority of Americans agreed about the importance of most topics. The main exceptions were community involvement and environmental conditions, which only a slight majority of people thought were crucial gauges of our national well-being. In this article by my colleague Ashley Wu and me, you’ll find more charts, as well as thoughts from the committee members about why economic performance seems to have become unmoored from health and happiness. As Birzer says, “It seems like the central question of modernity.” THE LATEST NEWS North American Tariffs President Claudia Sheinbaum, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times; Eric Lee/The New York Times; Justin Tang/The Canadian Press, via AP The leaders of Canada and Mexico made last-minute deals with President Trump to avoid a trade war. Trump postponed tariffs of up to 25 percent after the leaders said they would do more to block drugs and migrants. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, plans to send 10,000 more troops to the border. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would commit more resources to battling the spread of fentanyl. Trump said he would reconsider the tariffs in a month. What does Trump really want? He’s being intentionally vague. That allows him to declare victory when he sees fit, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Matina Stevis-Gridneff write. Chinese Tariffs The Yangshan Port near Shanghai. The New York Times Trump’s 10 percent tariffs on China took effect. The Chinese government retaliated with tariffs on natural gas, coal and other products from the United States. In addition, Chinese market regulators said they were investigating Google. USAID At USAID. Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had taken over as acting head of USAID, the government’s international aid agency, hours after Elon Musk said the White House was closing it. Musk railed against the agency on social media, calling it a “criminal organization” without offering evidence. “Time for it to die,” he wrote. Rubio said many of the agency’s programs — which include health services and disaster relief — were worthwhile. But he said its work needed to align more closely with U.S. foreign policy goals. Democratic lawmakers said the White House could not dismantle the agency, which Congress helped create. “We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,” Representative Jamie Raskin told protesters outside USAID headquarters. “Beyond scrutiny”: Musk is sweeping through the federal government with a level of autonomy that has surprised even some Trump officials. Environmental Protection Agency The E.P.A. has begun clearing toxic debris from homes destroyed by the Los Angeles wildfires. The full cleanup will take many months. The Trump administration has warned more than 1,100 E.P.A. employees who work on climate change and other programs that it may fire them. International In Tehran. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times Scientists in Iran are researching a cruder but faster approach to developing an atomic weapon, intelligence found. Trump said he was seeking a deal to offer military aid to Ukraine in exchange for critical minerals. The country is rich in lithium and uranium. Who will govern Gaza after the war? Here are the four leading possibilities. Australia’s conservative opposition leader is following Trump’s playbook. But there are lines he won’t cross. El Salvador’s president offered to jail criminals deported by the U.S. for a fee. D.C. Plane Crash On the Potomac River. Al Drago for The New York Times Crews lifted part of the wreckage of the American Airlines flight that crashed in Washington out of the Potomac River. Investigators are trying to determine if the pilots of the helicopter in the crash were wearing night vision goggles. A man who was engaged, a woman who died on her birthday: Read about the crash victims. Other Big Stories The Proud Boys no longer control their name. As part of a nearly $3 million ruling against the group, a judge gave the trademark to a Black church they vandalized. Leaders of the New Orleans Saints helped a local Catholic archdiocese manage a sex abuse scandal. They used their influence to shape public opinion and offered communications expertise. Trump directed the Treasury and Commerce Departments to create a sovereign wealth fund — an investment vehicle used by oil-rich countries like Norway and Saudi Arabia. A rescue team found the body of a 37-year-old hiker near a popular trail at Zion National Park. He appears to have fallen to his death. More microplastics are entering our brains, The Washington Post reports. Opinions Hank Azaria The New York Times Hank Azaria provides voices for many characters on “The Simpsons.” While A.I. might be able to recreate his sounds, it can’t recreate the soul of the work, he writes. DeepSeek, China’s A.I. success, is a warning that when the U.S. tech industry isn’t competitive, it will be vulnerable to foreign rivals, the former F.T.C. chair Lina Khan argues. Here’s a column by Michelle Goldberg on echoes of Iraq in Washington. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS The University of California, Los Angeles. Alisha Jucevic for The New York Times On campus: The University of California increased diversity. Now it’s being sued. Risk: Could the bird flu become airborne? The Great Read: He went to jail for stealing someone’s identity. But it was his all along. Ask Well: Can alcohol cause a panic attack? Most clicked yesterday: A story about how weight-loss drugs are transforming marriages. Lives Lived: Marion Wiesel translated many books written by her husband, Elie Wiesel, and encouraged him to become the most renowned interpreter of the Holocaust. She was 94. SPORTS Super Bowl: Homeland Security officials expressed confidence in the security arrangements for New Orleans. Tennis: A bizarre collision between Belgian Zizou Bergs and Chilean Cristian Garin at the Davis Cup led to an injured eye and a controversial ruling. ARTS AND IDEAS In Altadena, Calif. Loren Elliott for The New York Times After the fires, Los Angeles has a choice: Will it remake itself into something largely familiar or take a bolder path? In London and Chicago, historic fires fast-tracked urban change. The Times’s architecture critic explores how Los Angeles could rebuild better. More on culture Chappell Roan Allison Dinner/EPA, via Shutterstock See the best outfits at the Grammy Awards. A French court convicted an influential film director, Christophe Ruggia, of sexually assaulting the actress Adèle Haenel when she was a minor. Late night hosts joked about Trump’s tariffs. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times Dip homemade garlic Parmesan wings into ranch dressing or try our other Super Bowl recipes. Reduce single-use plastic in your bathroom. Declutter your fridge. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was divinely. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 5, 2025 Author Members Posted February 5, 2025 February 5, 2025 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering the overhaul of the federal government. We’re also covering Gaza, deportation flights and Gen X. President Trump Eric Lee/The New York Times Remaking government Last night, the website for the U.S. Agency for International Development came back after days offline. It displayed a short message: Almost all USAID staff are being placed on leave. During his first two weeks back in office, President Trump has fired prosecutors and agency watchdogs across the government. He offered employees payouts to resign, threatening mass layoffs if they didn’t. He tried to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans. More is reportedly coming; the F.B.I. and the Education Department are likely future targets. All of this news can seem chaotic and unpredictable. But beneath it all, Trump has a vision. To achieve his policy goals, he argues, the federal government has to change: First, it must become more efficient. Second, the “deep state” that Trump believes opposed him during his first term must go. Today’s newsletter will look at these two rationales — and what could get in Trump’s way. 1. Government efficiency Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency intends to slash $1 trillion in federal spending and bring Silicon Valley productivity to the federal work force. Only then, the thinking goes, can the government move swiftly enough to implement Trump’s ambitious policy agenda. Musk is acting quickly and noisily. He has dispatched a phalanx of Silicon Valley acolytes to access computer and accounting systems controlled by civil servants. In explaining his actions, he has vilified government agencies, calling USAID a “criminal organization” without evidence. (“Time for it to die,” he added.) He has told friends that he measures his success in taxpayer dollars saved per day. Elon Musk during the Inauguration. Kenny Holston/The New York Times But Congress has power of the purse, and the president cannot, under the Constitution, unilaterally shut down programs that Congress has funded. Already, courts ruled against Trump’s attempt to freeze federal grants and loans. And even if he could fire all civilian employees, their pay makes up just 4 percent of the federal budget. Most spending goes to the military, Social Security, Medicare and programs that help low-income Americans (such as food stamps and Medicaid). Cuts to those areas could be unpopular — both with the public and with the lawmakers who’d need to vote for them. For now, Trump has left all of those expensive programs unscathed. Instead, his administration has targeted relatively small agencies, like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which have historically operated with a lot of autonomy. 2. Dismantling the ‘deep state’ What, then, could explain Trump’s choices? That autonomy may be the true target. Trump believes a group of federal employees, which he calls the “deep state,” stifled his first-term agenda. Some government workers have admitted as much. One of Trump’s grievances is how long it takes to make policy: Ideas often have to go through studies, contracting proposals, public comment periods and more before officials implement them. Then they have to survive legal challenges. A determined federal employee who opposes a policy proposal could take advantage of this process to slow things down. In the Oval Office. Eric Lee/The New York Times Trump knows that he wants to accomplish many things that the disproportionately liberal federal work force dislikes. He wants to deport millions of unauthorized migrants, roll back policies that fight climate change and impose tariffs. He wants people in power, from the rank and file to cabinet secretaries, who will faithfully execute that vision. So his administration has tried to entice his opponents to leave — by offering payouts, abolishing remote work and threatening layoffs. But remaking the federal work force is not easy. Laws, regulations and union contracts protect employees. The administration can’t eliminate many programs on its own. Some workers have filed lawsuits to stop the Trump administration’s actions. Will it work? The lawsuits hint at a broader problem with the administration’s efforts: Much of what it’s doing might be illegal. Eventually, the courts could step in to stop Trump and Musk. Congress could, too. Trump is betting that the other branches of government won’t intervene. In his first term, he stocked the Supreme Court with friendly justices. Republicans now control the House and the Senate, and they have stood up for Trump and Musk’s efforts so far. “To my friends who are upset, I would say with respect, you know, Call somebody who cares,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said this week. “They better get used to this. It’s USAID today. It’s going to be Department of Education tomorrow.” Related: Trump has brazenly defied the law in his attempts to seize more executive power, my colleague Charlie Savage writes. For more Several groups, including F.B.I. agents and public sector unions, filed lawsuits yesterday challenging Trump’s plans to remake the government. “The Daily” is on Musk’s role in Washington today. THE LATEST NEWS Middle East Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump. Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times Trump proposed that the U.S. seize control of Gaza and relocate Palestinians there to other countries. He said he would turn the territory into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Trump did not say how the U.S. would convince, or force, more than two million Gazans to leave. “I don’t think they’re going to tell me no,” he said. Palestinian leaders and Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, immediately rejected the idea. Egypt and Jordan, the two countries that Trump said could receive Palestinians, recently denounced a similar suggestion. Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the White House yesterday, said of Trump’s proposal: “This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace.” Trump signed an executive order calling for a review of U.S. funding and involvement in the United Nations. He also withdrew the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council and stopped funding UNRWA, the agency that aids Palestinians. Trump’s proposal continued the trend toward imperialism that has run through his second administration, Peter Baker writes. Read more takeaways from the announcement. Trump Administration Members of the Senate’s finance committee. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Senate committees advanced the contentious nominations of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, joined his party to advance Kennedy’s nomination. Cassidy, a doctor, had agonized over Kennedy’s views on vaccines. The Senate confirmed Pam Bondi, a former Florida prosecutor who defended Trump at his first impeachment, as attorney general. The acting F.B.I. director, Brian Driscoll, received his role through a White House website error. He has become the subject of memes for resisting the Trump administration’s changes. Congressional Republicans have filed several bills to flatter Trump, including ones that would rename Dulles Airport in his honor and add his likeness to Mount Rushmore. Immigration The Trump administration sent its first flights of migrants to Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, where service members are preparing a tent city to detain up to 30,000. A U.S. military plane deporting at least 100 people landed in India, a top source of unauthorized immigration to the U.S. El Salvador’s president offered to jail convicted criminals deported by the U.S., even if they were U.S. citizens. Trump said he would jail Americans there “in a heartbeat” if he could. Experts said that would be illegal. Other Big Stories In Orebro, Sweden. Kicki Nilsson/TT News Agency, via Associated Press A shooting at an adult education center in Sweden killed at least 10 people, including the perpetrator. The prime minister said it was the worst mass shooting in Sweden’s history. A Times video investigation shows what happened in the moments before an Army helicopter and a passenger jet collided near Washington, D.C. A man who plotted to bomb Heathrow Airport in London in support of Al Qaeda was sentenced to 44 years in prison. The wealthy Los Angeles community of Pacific Palisades, devastated by recent wildfires, will likely become even more exclusive and expensive as it rebuilds. Josh Kraft, a son of the owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft, is running for mayor of Boston against Michelle Wu, the progressive incumbent. Opinions Ukraine built two million drones in secret last year — a sign that Trump should invest in its innovative defense industry, Farah Stockman writes. Here are columns by Bret Stephens on the end of Pax Americana and Zeynep Tufekci on artificial intelligence. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Naila Ruechel for The New York Times The Perennials: While young people fret, Gen X women are having the best sex. Health: As bird flu spreads, experts explain what you should know about egg safety. Loosen up: A simple strength and mobility routine can help relieve pain from tight hips. Most clicked yesterday: A study on how Americans are wealthy but unhappy. Couples therapy: How I learned the problem in my marriage was me. Lives Lived: The Aga Khan IV, the leader of Ismaili Muslims, a branch of the Shiite tradition of Islam, was one of the world’s wealthiest hereditary rulers. He died at 88. (See photos of his life in his obituary.) SPORTS N.F.L.: The league is removing the “End Racism” message that it stenciled in each end zone during the Super Bowl for the last four years. It will instead use “Choose Love” and “It Takes All Of Us.” N.B.A. trades: Could another big name be on the move? Teams including the Warriors are preparing to pursue Kevin Durant. Tennis: Romanian player Simona Halep, a former world No. 1 who won two Grand Slam tournaments, announced her retirement. ARTS AND IDEAS Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Graham Dickie/The New York Times Martha Stewart’s best-selling first book, “Entertaining,” has long been out of print. But two recent documentaries have made her popular with a younger generation, and many influencers have tried to buy vintage copies. The publisher is now promising to reprint it in all its 1980s glory. Read more about the book. More on culture The 2025 Met Gala’s theme will be “tailored for you,” inspired by an exhibition that focuses on the history of the Black dandy. Jimmy Kimmel joked about Trump’s foreign policy. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Linda Xiao for The New York Times Sweeten a baked lemon pudding with blueberry jam. Host a cozy winter meal — and give it a theme. Stock your junk drawer with actually useful things. Freshen your hair with the best dry shampoo. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were hateful and healthful. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 6, 2025 Author Members Posted February 6, 2025 February 6, 2025 By David Leonhardt Good morning. Today, we’re covering President Trump’s early stumbles — as well as Gaza, transgender athletes and vintage furniture. President Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times Trump vs. Trump The biggest impediment to a successful second term for President Trump may be Trump himself. For all the early energy of his presidency — the flurry of executive orders, confirmations and firings — Trump has looked less disciplined this week than he did in the initial days after returning to office. The last few days have instead conjured the chaos of his first term, when his grand pronouncements often failed to change government policy. The first part of this week was dominated by Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but he postponed them in exchange for the countries’ promise to do things they were largely already doing. On Tuesday, Trump announced a plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza that even American allies like Saudi Arabia dismissed as unworkable. The reaction was so bad that White House aides walked back parts of the plan yesterday. Neither of these policy announcements seems likely to lead to tangible accomplishments. And both have the potential to make him look weak. It’s true that over-the-top pronouncements can have ancillary benefits for Trump. Steve Bannon, his former adviser, talks frequently about the value of “flooding the zone” so that Trump’s political opponents can’t focus energy on stopping any one of his changes. Trump’s promise of turning Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East” could keep Democrats from mobilizing opposition to, say, Elon Musk’s campaign against foreign aid. But there are also costs for Trump. He and his allies have ambitious goals for remaking federal policy. They want to cut taxes, shrink the government, expand manufacturing, deport undocumented immigrants, restrict immigration, end “wokeism,” contain China, weaken Iran, strengthen Israel and Saudi Arabia and pull back from Europe. High-profile policies that fall flat don’t get Trump's team closer to these goals. A finite asset The attention and resources of the Trump administration are limited, too. Each long-shot policy that the administration pursues has an opportunity cost. Trump’s first term included relatively few policy accomplishments (his tax cut being a notable exception) because he spent so much time on ideas that went nowhere. Remember “infrastructure week,” which never led to an actual law? Or the nonexistent peace deal with North Korea? Or the Covid treatment ideas with no medical benefits? The recent tariff reversal is a useful case study of opportunity cost. Trump’s quick reversal means that other countries now have less reason to make substantial concessions to him to avoid a future tariff; performative promises may be enough. A more successful tariff showdown this week would also have helped flood the zone, without making Trump look ineffectual. Imagine, for example, if he had instead threatened tariffs on European countries — and they responded with big increases in military spending, as he wants. I’m not trying to suggest that Trump’s new term has been free of meaningful change. He has done a lot in the past two and a half weeks. His immigration crackdown is real and continues to be broadly popular. His changes to gender and diversity policy are substantial. He has fired federal employees who won’t do what he wants. And even though he has brazenly defied the law to grab power, Senate Republicans have responded meekly. Trump is still a strong president enjoying the heady weeks after inauguration. Yet the most ambitious version of his second term will require more than early strength. It will require a discipline that was lacking eight years ago — and that his aides promised would be present from the start this time. It will require using his singular ability to dominate attention in a way that leads to the changes he wants. That hasn’t happened over the past few days. If you’re a Trump supporter, it should be worrisome. If you’re a Trump opponent, it should offer a small measure of relief. For more Trump’s sudden announcement on Gaza surprised senior members of his administration. There were no meetings about it. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s leader, are close. Their news conference put that on display. Some Arab and Muslim leaders who voted for Trump doubt he’ll follow through on his proposal to remove Palestinians from Gaza. “It’s all just talk,” one said. “Outrageous, criminal, harebrained”: Palestinians in the U.S. reacted to Trump’s plan with shock. THE LATEST NEWS Politics In the East Room of the White House. Eric Lee/The New York Times Trump signed an executive order to bar transgender women competing in women’s sports. K-12 schools and colleges that violate it would risk losing federal money. The Justice Department accused the acting F.B.I. director of “insubordination” for refusing to identify agents who investigated the Jan. 6 attack. The C.I.A. is offering employees an option to quit but be paid through September. A similar offer to other federal workers last week excluded national security-related agencies. Trump revoked the security detail for Mark Esper, a former defense secretary who wrote a critical book about his time in the first Trump administration. Thousands protested across the U.S. against Trump, part of a grass-roots effort to kick off a national movement. Track what Trump has done since he took office. Media Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, will begin hosting a weekend show on Fox News this month. The F.C.C. released the transcript of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. Trump has sued the show, claiming it deceptively edited her responses. International In Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. Guerchom Ndebo for The New York Times Fighting between Rwandan-backed forces and Congolese soldiers left nearly 3,000 dead in a matter of days. “We have days of mass burials ahead of us,” a Red Cross official said. Ukrainians are appealing to conservative American Christians to try to keep military aid flowing. A large Ukrainian delegation is attending the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Other Big Stories Near Los Angeles, during the wildfires. Mario Tama/Getty Images Last month was the warmest January on record. We recreated what the helicopter pilots could see before the Washington crash. The U.S. trade deficit in goods topped $1 trillion last year. Google abandoned its diversity goals, citing Trump’s executive orders. Another atmospheric river is set to hit Northern California. Meteorologists explained why these heavy storms are still so hard to predict. Opinions Rebecca Chew/The New York Times Timothy White came out as gay to his father, an evangelical pastor. He shares his father’s journal entries from the time. Free trade is a myth that other countries have exploited at America’s expense, Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former trade representative, writes. Greenland is not for sale, and it never will be, Aqqaluk Lynge and Gitte Seeberg write. The world’s richest man is hurting the world’s poorest children, Nicholas Kristof writes. Here is Charles Blow’s final column. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS At Fives, in the French Quarter. Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times New Orleans: The city loves its oysters. Most clicked yesterday: Gen X women are having the best sex. Raw account: Joan Didion kept a diary 25 years ago. It’s about to become public. “Guntube”: Firearms influencers on YouTube are changing American gun culture. Blurb fatigue: Collecting endorsement quotes for book covers is a time-consuming and dispiriting process. Vocal coach: Meet the man who helps Angelina Jolie and Timothée Chalamet sing onscreen. Gut health: This is what alcohol may be doing to you. Lives Lived: Gene Barge, known as Daddy G, was one of the last surviving saxophonists of the golden age of R&B. His career ran the gamut of 20th-century Black popular music. He died at 98. SPORTS N.B.A.: The Heat traded Jimmy Butler to the Warriors for Andrew Wiggins and a first-round pick. Toronto Raptors: The Canadian team acquired the Pelicans star Brandon Ingram for multiple players and picks. N.F.L.: The Browns defensive end Myles Garrett said he spoke to LeBron James before requesting a trade out of Cleveland. ARTS AND IDEAS A reupholstered chair. Lesley Unruh People are reimagining vintage furniture. Restoring or reupholstering a chair or chest of drawers makes it look almost new again. Other times, with a few changes, an interior designer said, “It looks like a completely different piece of furniture.” Read how designers do it. More on culture Clara B. Martin Some people are using sketchbooks instead of an iPhone to document their vacations. ASAP Rocky, on trial for assault, has worn high-fashion looks in court. Karla Sofía Gascón, the Oscar-nominated actress in Emilia Pérez, is at the center of a scandal over her old social media posts. The Points Guy has some travel tips for you (including charging your rent to accrue points). THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Top these creamy, spicy tomato beans with lemony greens. Save money with an at-home haircut kit. Ditch the stain remover — and opt for this hack instead. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was janitor. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 8, 2025 Author Members Posted February 8, 2025 February 7, 2025 By German Lopez Good morning. Today, we’re covering an imbalance of power in the government, as well as the U.S. aid agency, a two-state solution and MrBeast’s class consciousness. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Constitutional crisis? In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful. President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down. The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.” As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked. Today’s newsletter looks at why — and where things could go next. What went wrong The framers wanted to avoid crowning another king. They believed that no one person could truly represent the whole country. (Consider that Trump won less than half of the vote.) So they dispersed power among the three branches. The president is just one person, Yuval Levin, a conservative analyst, told The Times. In a vast country, representation “has to be done by a plural institution like Congress.” Congress ratifying the presidential election result on Jan. 6, 2025. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images But polarization has made it harder for Congress to play that role. For much of American history, the two parties were made up of broad coalitions of voters. Seventy years ago, liberals, minority groups and racial segregationists were all part of the Democratic Party. A president could not always rely on members of his party to let him do what he wanted, because they were genuinely divided. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, for instance, he wanted to privatize Social Security. His own party helped quash the plan. Today, the two parties are more homogeneous. The Republican Party has adopted Trump’s views — against foreign interventions, “wokeism” and immigration. And the G.O.P. controls all three branches of government. So the conflict that’s supposed to drive interactions among the branches is muted; Congress, and potentially the courts, are less likely to rein in the president. Now he can impose drastic changes even without a majority’s mandate. How this ends This is about the separation of powers, not a specific policy. Maybe you think that TikTok should remain online or that the U.S.A.I.D. shutdown makes sense because the government should spend more on Americans and less on foreign aid. But other government branches’ lack of pushback sets a precedent that Trump can act like a king. Maybe next time he’d undo the Education Department, vaccine programs or food stamps. Or his administration could repurpose federal funds to imprison unauthorized migrants in detention camps. It could, in a far-fetched scenario, take possession of the Gaza Strip. Normally, these are policies on which Congress must get a say. Nyhan’s research team has surveyed political scientists at American universities about how worried they are right now. During most of Trump’s first term, the respondents’ opinions about the health of our democracy were largely stable. But their confidence has plunged since Trump’s second inauguration. Source: Bright Line Watch | By The New York Times The courts may still intervene, as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer to pay federal employees to quit. The courts might not reverse every action; several U.S.A.I.D. programs have already stopped dispensing food and medicine abroad, for lack of funds. But the courts could stop Trump from taking similar actions in the future. Maybe the conservative Supreme Court would hold the White House to account. Nyhan worries about another scenario: What if Trump ignores the courts? Before he was vice president, JD Vance suggested that Trump should do that if the court blocked efforts to remake the federal government. “Stand before the country and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said, referring to an apocryphal Andrew Jackson quote. Perhaps Trump is already flirting with that kind of defiance. Some federal loans and grants remain frozen despite court orders against Trump’s freeze. “We’re talking about the idea of whether the president has to follow the law at all,” Nyhan said. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to say about the United States, but here we are.” Related coverage More than 10,000 people work for U.S.A.I.D. The Trump administration plans to keep only about 290. U.S.A.I.D. funded medical research around the world. Trump’s shutdown has left scores of people with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to care. For the second time this week, a federal judge issued an injunction to block Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. The Justice Department appealed the ruling. Attorneys general in a dozen states are preparing a lawsuit to block Musk’s DOGE team from gaining access to government computer systems that contain sensitive information. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration Women’s volleyball players from San Jose State University and Fresno State. Amy Osborne for The New York Times The N.C.A.A. said transgender women could not compete in women’s college sports, aligning its policy with an executive order that Trump signed this week. The Senate confirmed Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Democrats had pulled an all-nighter delivering speeches to protest Vought’s confirmation. Trump ordered the firing of the chair of the Federal Election Commission, but she said his move was not legal. Religion The National Prayer Breakfast. Eric Lee/The New York Times At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump called for unity and peace — a departure from his other comments this week. The president convened a task force to fight “anti-Christian bias.” Media The White House is cutting news subscriptions for employees. Politico has been the subject of a social media misinformation campaign. Trump and others claimed the government had paid millions of dollars to the site for positive coverage of Democrats, but the government actually had subscriptions to Politico Pro, a premium news service. International A Sudanese Army soldier. El Tayeb Siddig/Reuters The war between Sudan’s army and paramilitary forces has intensified. Recent fighting has killed hundreds of people, including children. Trump’s plan to take over Gaza and potentially allow Israeli annexation of the West Bank would effectively end the two-state solution, Peter Baker writes. Trump signed an executive order placing sanctions on the International Criminal Court, months after the court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. The European Union spent last year compiling a secret playbook for how to respond if Trump raised tariffs. Read about the plans. Aviation A plane carrying 10 people went missing off the coast of Alaska. The Army helicopter that collided with a passenger jet near Washington last week had its tracking technology turned off. A U.S. military contractor plane crashed in the Philippines, killing all four people on board. Trump said he would work with Congress to improve aviation safety. Customs officials at LAX found 37 live beetles, worth about $1,500, being smuggled inside snack bags and containers from Japan. Other Big Stories In New York City. The New York Times Federal authorities are investigating Shen Yun, the touring dance group run by the Falun Gong religious movement. (Young performers told The Times last year that the group had exploited them. The federal investigation focuses at least partly on claims of visa fraud.) A power company, Southern California Edison, said it had found equipment irregularities near the origin of the Eaton fire. Opinions Trump’s first weeks in office are the beginning of a constitutional revolution that seeks to overwrite the work of the founders, David French argues. Here’s a column by Michelle Goldberg on Trump’s Gaza proposal. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Illustration by Liana Finck Confessions of a ghost: Ten people explain why they went silent on a relationship. Surveillance pricing: Retailers use technology to predict which customers might be willing to pay more — then they raise their prices, The Cut reports. Most clicked yesterday: Six ways alcohol can affect your gut health. Whale words: Humpbacks’ songs share structural patterns with human language, scientists found. Visiting London: Want to get to know the locals? Stay in a pub. Lives Lived: Virginia Halas McCaskey watched N.F.L. history unfold as she cheered on the Chicago Bears alongside her father, George Halas, the team’s founder, and then oversaw the organization as its owner. She died at 102. SPORTS N.F.L.: In a major upset, the Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. N.B.A.: Teams made deals in the hours before the trade deadline. Here are the winners. ARTS AND IDEAS Gucci in fall 2016. Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times The ready-to-wear fashion shows have begun in New York and will soon roll through London, Milan and Paris. The first major trend is already clear, our fashion critic Vanessa Friedman wrote: Big-name fashion houses are combining their men’s and women’s shows. Read what to expect. Related: Gucci’s designer is leaving. More on culture On YouTube, MrBeast has long prompted people to do extreme tasks for money. He’s becoming more class conscious. Na Kim designed notable book covers. Now, she’s gaining recognition as a painter. Jimmy Kimmel joked about the National Prayer Breakfast. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times Make a jalapeño-corn dip. Find a great Valentine’s Day gift for kids. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was immediacy. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —German Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 10, 2025 Author Members Posted February 10, 2025 February 8, 2025 By Melissa Kirsch Good morning. Movie audiences are cracking up during serious scenes. What’s a theatergoer to do? María Jesús Contreras Dark comedy There used to be a multiplex near my house that we called the “Babysitter 12” because it felt like, no matter the film on view, the theater was always full of people laughing, screaming, horsing around. I stopped going there after a while because while it was fun to be part of a boisterous crowd during, say, a Marvel movie, the constant din during more serious films grew distracting. The Babysitter 12 closed during the pandemic, when people’s living rooms became their theaters. My colleague Marie Solis recently wrote a story for The Times about a “laugh epidemic” in movie theaters. People are chuckling aloud during violent, sexy and scary scenes in movies like “Anora,” “Babygirl” and “Nosferatu.” For some moviegoers, this behavior is appalling, disconsonant with what they think the appropriate response should be. Marie puts forward some theories as to why some people are laughing at moments that others think require more gravity. Perhaps we became accustomed to watching movies at home and forgot our theater etiquette. There’s been such genre collapse in movies that it can be hard to tell what’s meant to be funny and what’s not — is “Babygirl” an erotic thriller or an erotic comedy? Maybe we’re uncomfortable with a scene so we laugh nervously, or we laugh to show we get a reference. I saw a fairly serious movie about a violent relationship in the theater last summer and was surprised at how much laughter there was during tense scenes. I had the sense that groups of friends who’d been laughing and joking before the lights went down were having a hard time switching gears, that their laughter was almost like a glitch in their software as they went from the delight of a high-spirited night out to the sober nature of what they were watching onscreen. I remembered the experience of the Babysitter 12, how part of the reason I stopped going was because I didn’t like myself when I felt that others were misbehaving. My inclination was to be the busybody who shushes strangers who are just having a good time. I like the rules of the Alamo Drafthouse theaters, where they declare that anyone who uses a cellphone or talks during the film will be expelled. (I have never seen this happen and imagine that the threat of such a sanction is enough to scare potential rowdy patrons straight.) The point of going to the movies, though, is other people, as intrusive and perplexing as they might be. The reactions of other moviegoers to the movie is part of moviegoing. Yes, there are shows now designed to be streamed alone, at home, on a small screen. But when I’m at the theater, I want to be generous, to take in the fullness of the audience, the community. I want to let it all in, to subscribe to the view that one person Marie talked to put forth: that experiencing emotions not just about the film you’re watching, but also about your fellow audience members, is “what makes film-going really exciting.” You can’t get that in your living room. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Hip-Hop A scene from the “Humble” music video. Kendrick Lamar’s expressive stagings, in music videos and live performances, strike like poetry. Ahead of his Super Bowl halftime show, here’s a look at some of his most indelible visuals. Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by Jay-Z, revived the Super Bowl halftime show by making it a hip-hop showcase. Is there room for other genres, too? Irv Gotti, the hip-hop mogul who built Murder Inc. into one of the most influential record labels of the early 2000s, died this week at 54. Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, rescinded a past apology for antisemitic comments and professed his love for Adolf Hitler in a social media rant. Classical “My heart is in Ukraine”: When Russia invaded, a German town took in the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra. Three years later, the musicians can’t help but long for home. Daniel Barenboim, a major figure in classic music, announced that he has Parkinson’s disease. Barenboim transformed the Berlin State Opera into one of the world’s leading houses. A 311-year-old Stradivarius violin sold for over $11 million. The instrument was once owned by Joseph Joachim, one of the great violinists of the 19th century and a close associate of Johannes Brahms. Film and TV “Anora” won best picture at the Critics Choice Awards. Demi Moore (“The Substance”) won best actress, and Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”) won best actor. See a list of winners and the best red carpet looks. TV soap operas have mostly disappeared from popular culture. “Beyond the Gates,” which focuses on a Black family in Maryland, hopes to rejuvenate the genre. Sarah Michelle Gellar revealed on Instagram that she is involved with a new “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series. Stuck inside with the kids this weekend? Here are five good children’s movies you can stream now. More Culture “Monk by the Sea,” 1808-10, by Caspar David Friedrich. Karsten Moran for The New York Times The Metropolitan Museum’s new exhibition of Caspar David Friedrich, the first major U.S. showcase of the German Romantic, offers a profound view of man and nature, Jason Farago writes. For the past 25 years, The Sims has turned players into lords of their own digital neighborhoods. The Times spoke with the game’s creator, Will Wright. “Urinetown,” the satirical musical comedy, has aged remarkably well in the past quarter century, our critic writes. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration Protesters supporting the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times A federal judge froze parts of President Trump’s plan to put thousands of U.S.A.I.D. employees on leave, after Trump directly called for the agency’s closure, writing on social media: “CLOSE IT DOWN!” Trump’s cuts to U.S.A.I.D. could disrupt funding for food, tents and medical treatment in Gaza. A judge temporarily restricted Elon Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, citing the risk of “irreparable harm.” Trump praised Elon Musk’s budget-slashing initiative, and he said he had directed Musk to scrutinize spending at the Pentagon. Musk’s enforcers: A clutch of young aides have swept into agency headquarters with black backpacks and ambitious orders to break the system. Trump halted all foreign assistance to South Africa, claiming that the country was discriminating against white landowners. More on Trump Trump said he was revoking Joe Biden’s security clearances. He did so, he said, because Biden had rescinded his clearances after the Jan. 6 attack. Experts believe Trump’s lawsuits against CBS and The Des Moines Register lack merit. But the suits have been effective at harassing the press — and there are probably more on the way. No more paper: Trump vowed to reverse a Biden administration plan to phase out plastic straws from the federal government’s food service operations. Trump said he would dismiss several board members from the Kennedy Center, the storied performing arts group in Washington, and install himself as chairman. Other Big Stories The Swedish government plans to tighten the country’s already-strict gun laws in response to a shooting at an adult education center that killed at least 10 people. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, said he takes seriously Trump’s threats to annex Canada and make it the 51st state. A storm in the U.S. could bring heavy snow across a band stretching from the Dakotas to Boston. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. CULTURE CALENDAR By Alexis Soloski ? Cobra Kai (Thursday) What is the sound of one hand tapping out? That not-quite-a-Zen koan fits “Cobra Kai,” a not remotely Zen show, which concludes its sixth and final season with five new episodes for Netflix. A maturation of the “Karate Kid” franchise, the show found the original movie’s characters (played now, as then, by Ralph Macchio and William Zabka) settled uncomfortably into Southern California midlife, and it quickly made them senseis of rival dojos. Now they’ll fight common enemies in a climactic worldwide karate tournament, in which teeth, lives, karate whites and dignity are all imperiled. For more: Macchio spoke with The Times about what drew him back to the iconic role. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Kerri Brewer for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Cheesy Green Chile Bean Bake A pot of savory canned beans is a speedy winter staple, a satisfying go-to on a cold February night. In her cheesy green chile bean bake, Ali Slagle makes them even better by covering a skillet full of pinto beans, poblano and salsa verde with Monterey Jack. The mild dairy softens the bite of the green chiles and adds a gooey texture with cheese pulls galore. Serve it for dinner over rice or with soft tortillas. Or leave it in the skillet and plop it on the coffee table to serve as a Super Bowl-friendly appetizer with tortilla chips for scooping. No utensils required. REAL ESTATE Ashley Bryn Carter in the place where her home once stood. Mark Abramson for The New York Times Devastation: After the wildfire comes the emotional toll of listing every object inside a destroyed home. What you get for $3,500 in Los Angeles: Rent a loft in Long Beach, a Spanish-Style house in La Quinta or a condominium unit in a Baldwin Park building designated as a landmark. Keep up with the Kardashians: Kris Jenner put the family’s longtime home on the market. The Hunt: After years of renting, a young couple in Manhattan went looking for a co-op unit they could buy. Which one did they pick? Play our game. LIVING Kiteboarders off the coast of Bonaire. Erik Freeland for The New York Times Travel: Go for cheap to the Caribbean. Get on a streak: Accomplish your goals by making them a habit. Egg safety: It’s unlikely that your dozen eggs are carrying bird flu. Playlist: Listen to Doechii and other new songs on our critic’s playlist. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER How to sanitize your kitchen sink After the effort of cooking a meal and clearing a sink full of dishes, cleaning the sink itself may be the last thing you want to do. Unfortunately, it’s important: It kills pathogens from produce and raw meat, and it helps keep the kitchen from getting smelly. Luckily, cleaning your sink can be an easy, two-step process. Scrub off grime with a bit of dish soap on a brush or sponge and then rinse the sink down. Next, sanitize it with a spray containing bleach, making sure to cover the faucets and handles. Let the spray sit for the recommended time (or about 30 seconds if no time is specified on the bottle), rinse with water, and voilà. A truly clean sink. — Abigail Bailey NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was quieting. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 10, 2025 Author Members Posted February 10, 2025 February 9, 2025 Good morning. Today we’ve got a guide to the Super Bowl. We’re also covering Donald Trump, German politics and art in New York. The Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, during Super Bowl LVII. Doug Mills/The New York Times A super sequel By Tom Wright-Piersanti I’m an editor on The Morning. The Kansas City Chiefs meet the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans for Super Bowl LIX tonight, and it’s likely that more than 100 million people will tune in. For many, it will be the only football game they watch this year. If you’re among that group, good news: This is an ideal matchup for casual fans. For one, it’s a rematch. Philadelphia and Kansas City played each other in the Super Bowl just two years ago, and plenty of familiar characters will return. Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce are back. Kelce’s girlfriend, Taylor Swift, will probably be there, too. And there’s history at stake. Kansas City is trying to win its third straight Super Bowl, which no team — not even Tom Brady’s New England Patriots dynasty — has ever done. In the rest of today’s newsletter, we’ve got a guide to the Super Bowl, with contributions from my colleagues around The Times. The teams One thing to know about Philadelphia: The Eagles have pioneered a play called the “tush push,” in which players line up behind the quarterback Jalen Hurts and shove him forward to gain a yard or two. When the Eagles ran the play this season, it worked more than 80 percent of the time, according to The Ringer. But that’s no guarantee it will work during the Super Bowl. As The Ringer notes, Kansas City shut down several tush pushes by the Buffalo Bills during the A.F.C. championship game. One thing to know about Kansas City: The team was 15-2 this season, but it won 11 of those victories, plus another in the playoffs, by a single score (meaning eight points or fewer). It won 17 straight one-score games, an N.F.L. record. The Athletic’s Mike Sando calculated that the odds of such a streak are about one-tenth of 1 percent. Is that a sign that Kansas City is lucky — or just great in clutch moments? The halftime show Kendrick Lamar Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated Press Kendrick Lamar’s smash “Not Like Us” is a lot of things: a Drake-slaying diss track, a No. 1 single, a Grammys darling. Tonight, it might also be part of a Super Bowl halftime show. But while casual viewers will hear an easily digestible crowd-pleaser, it’s also a strange hit for Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most revered M.C.s of all time. In recent years, Lamar had shied from the spotlight. He released an album about therapy and trauma. Now, on “Not Like Us,” he spends almost five minutes calling Drake — the most popular rapper of the last decade — a pedophile (Drake says this is false, and he’s suing the record label), along with a “jabroni” and a “colonizer.” Will the diss, which has been featured in promos for the performance, be the centerpiece of the show? Or will Lamar minimize its role — or even elide it entirely? —Joe Coscarelli, music reporter Read more: “Not Like Us” reinvented Kendrick Lamar. Is the Super Bowl ready for it? The commercials If 2022 was the cryptocurrency Super Bowl, this year’s broadcast will be remembered for its artificial intelligence ads. Viewers will be hit with pitches for A.I.-enabled personal assistants, reservation services and sunglasses. This year’s commercials are also low on controversy and creativity, with advertisers looking for safety in strenuous silliness and familiar celebrity faces. —Mike Hale, television critic Read more: Mike is ranking all of this year’s ads from best to worst. (The list will grow through the day as more ads are revealed.) The host city The return of the Super Bowl to New Orleans has taken months of extensive work. Around the French Quarter and the Superdome, there are new streetlights and sidewalks. Some buildings have been covered in colorful murals. Tourism drives the city’s economy, and the Super Bowl — which will draw as many as 150,000 people — offers an unrivaled platform to pitch itself on TV as a destination. The rush of improvements has provoked a complicated reaction among residents. One lamented that the area now looks like a Disney theme park. Others have found it somewhat heartening after the deadly New Year’s Day terrorist attack. And the changes have stoked frustration over the city’s persistent potholes and decaying infrastructure. “Finish fixing the streets,” a resident said. “Finish beautifying, finish putting flowers out. Keep the stuff well lit. Keep the police presence. We deserve all of that.” —Rick Rojas, Atlanta bureau chief Read more: After New Orleans’s Super Bowl makeover, some residents say: What about us? More Super Bowl coverage President Trump is expected to attend the game, a first for a sitting president. He has a fraught history with the N.F.L., dating to his failed attempts to buy a team. When the players enter the stadium in flashy outfits, you can thank Kyle Smith, the league’s first fashion editor. This Eagles fan wears a different jersey every day. He’s got 300. NYT Cooking has a collection of recipes, including air-fryer wings, pickle biscuits and baked mac and cheese. From The Athletic Here’s how the two teams — their coaches, quarterbacks and more — compare, by the numbers. Tom Brady, no stranger to the Super Bowl, is calling the game on TV for the first time. Joe Buck, Al Michaels and others offered advice. Putting together a pool for your Super Bowl party? Here’s a list of fun prop bets about the game, the broadcast and the halftime show. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration Russell Vought, the newly confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget, instructed employees of a federal financial watchdog to cease activity. Federal employees blocked several Democratic lawmakers from entering the Department of Education. A judge ordered a halt to Elon Musk team’s access to Treasury payment systems. Some are concerned that the team’s work makes the system vulnerable to Chinese and Russian hacking. Trump’s opponents have turned to the federal courts to frustrate his flurry of executive orders. The judiciary, however, may struggle to keep up. Trump’s heavy-handed approach to traditional journalists echoes Richard Nixon’s attempted press crackdown 50 years ago, Jim Rutenberg writes. More on Politics Vivek Ramaswamy Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Vivek Ramaswamy is yet to formally announce his campaign for Ohio governor but his celebrity and ties to Trump already give him an edge. The city of Springfield, Ohio, sued a neo-Nazi group for intimidating Haitian residents and locals who spoke in support of them. International In central Gaza. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times Hamas handed over three Israeli hostages in exchange for 183 Palestinians jailed by Israel. Hamas fighters prodded the gaunt hostages to give short speeches thanking their captors. Children living near Ukraine’s front line attend school underground or online. Experts say the nation’s students are falling behind. At least one thing unites Germany’s political parties: rejection of Angela Merkel’s legacy. Other Big Stories A winter storm has brought snow in the northeastern U.S. Donors on GoFundMe have given more for Los Angeles fire relief than for all natural disasters worldwide last year. In New York, three ducks at the Queens Zoo died because of bird flu, and Bronx Zoo is conducting flu tests on 12 more birds that died. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Should Musk have this much power? No. While Americans focus on Musk’s cost-cutting mission, they don’t realize he is also collecting vast amounts of private data. “An ‘unelected, unaccountable billionaire’ threatens civil servants’ privacy and national security,” The Washington Post’s Colbert King writes. Yes. Musk’s reforms — including buying out workers and dismantling agencies — are extreme because he is reforming an extremist government. He is up against “a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far,” The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan writes. FROM OPINION “The Palestinians are here to stay”: While governments debate the future of Gaza, five Palestinian scholars discuss what self-determination means for them. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the American empire and Maureen Dowd on Trump’s “Mean Girls.” Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS James Denmark’s “Untitled.” via James Denmark and Lloyd Toone; Photo by Stan Narten Galleries: See new art in New York City this month. Routine: How the costume designer for “Wicked” spends his Sundays. Space: The odds of an asteroid striking Earth in 2032 keep going up and down. Here’s why. Vows: They got married in Antarctica. Lives Lived: Sam Nujoma directed a guerrilla army in a 24-year war for Namibia’s independence from South African rule, and became his country’s founding president. He died at 95. BOOK OF THE WEEK By Elisabeth Egan “This is a Love Story,” by Jessica Soffer: The title doesn’t lie — this is a love story. But, just in time for Valentine’s Day, Soffer’s unapologetically romantic novel includes many tales that tug at the heartstrings. First and foremost is the long marriage of Abe and Jane, a writer and an artist whose complicated, colorful life together is winding down as she lays dying. While he runs through a litany of their memories together — a veritable “14,000 Things to be Happy About” plus enough stinkers to keep it real — we catch glimpses of other great loves: their son’s connection with his grandmother, Jane’s mind meld with an old friend, Abe’s affinity for the march of words on a page and New Yorkers’ devotion to Central Park. Soffer’s saga goes down like bittersweet chocolate, with a hint of sugar to soften the sharp edge of loss. THE INTERVIEW Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By David Marchese This week’s subject for The Interview is the legendary actor Denzel Washington. He’s starring in the title role of “Othello” in a new Broadway production that begins previews on Feb. 24. I’m always curious about actors, and artists generally, when they realize that their art is also a business. Does that affect how you approached the work itself? When I learned about my least favorite uncle, my Uncle Sam, that was the eye opener. I’m like, He takes what? That’s the reality of it, and a dollar is not a dollar. By the time agents, lawyer, business manager, Uncle Sam, everybody else gets finished with you, a dollar’s about 38 cents. So you’ve got to cobble those 38 cents together to make a real dollar. But does that affect the work? If you know that something is a money job, do you go about that job any differently? You’re asking me, Did I ever take a job for money? No, I’m asking — Because I was about to answer it. OK. I’ve taken every job for money. There’s no job I’ve taken where I went: You guys just keep the money. I’m just so glad to be an actor. I don’t even want the money. This is a base question, but did you find that you cared about not getting an Oscar nomination for “Gladiator II”? I was sitting there smiling, going: Look at you. On the day you didn’t get a nomination for an Oscar, you’re working on “Othello” on Broadway. Are you kidding me? Awww. Oh, I’m so upset. Listen, I’ve been around too long. I’m getting wiser, working on talking less and learning to understand more — and that’s exciting. Read more of the interview here. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Photograph by Naila Ruechel for The New York Times Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Boost your productivity when working from home. Subscribe to recycled toilet paper. Wake with a sunrise alarm clock. MEAL PLAN David Malosh for The New York Times In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein suggests making a spicy creamy Bolognese (which features a brilliant secret ingredient: red curry paste), a blackened salmon, and lemony chicken with potatoes and oregano. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was anarchical. Can you put eight historical events — including the first flowers, the first domesticated dogs, and the carving of the Grand Canyon — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 11, 2025 Author Members Posted February 11, 2025 February 10, 2025 Good morning. We’re covering crypto. We’re also covering tariffs, pennies and the Super Bowl. Outside a cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong. Tyrone Siu/Reuters Crypto’s connections By David Yaffe-Bellany I cover cryptocurrencies. Few people own cryptocurrencies. You have to create a digital wallet. Your bank might not offer them as investments. In recent years, the government has treated this new form of money, which can be transferred instantly with little oversight, as a risky asset. Because most digital coins have no inherent value — they are worth only what people will pay for them — speculators drive the price up and down quickly. So when crypto crashed three years ago, the fallout didn’t wreck the whole economy. The price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies plummeted. Several companies entered bankruptcy. Top executives went to prison. Analysts called it crypto’s Great Recession. But while crypto traders lost a lot of money, ordinary people barely noticed. President Trump could change that. He’s a fan of this relatively new form of digital money. He promotes digital coins to his followers (and profits when they purchase them). He promises to create a federal stash of Bitcoin and enable companies to offer more coins to the public. The result is that, in the coming years, many more Americans will likely own crypto, exposing them to its perils. Next time the industry crashes, analysts fear, the impact could be more severe, rippling across the economy and hurting a wider array of investors. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain three ways that Trump is deepening crypto’s connection to mainstream finance. Trump coins The riskiest type of crypto may be the memecoin, a digital currency based on an online joke or a celebrity mascot. It has no practical use, and vendors won’t accept it as a form of payment. Three days before his inauguration, Trump created his own memecoin, calling it $Trump. He advertised it on his social media accounts. Crypto investors snapped up $Trump coins, causing the price to skyrocket. The Trump family collected millions of dollars in fees. In effect, Trump had put a presidential seal of approval on speculation — and profited from it. The surge didn’t last long. The coin’s price dropped 60 percent overnight, and hundreds of thousands of people lost money. Who suffered? An analysis by a crypto forensics firm found that most of the coin’s buyers were probably first-time investors in digital currencies. Less oversight The Biden administration spent years cracking down on crypto. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a series of lawsuits arguing that digital currencies should be subject to the same strict rules that govern stocks and bonds on Wall Street. The aim was to protect consumers. For years, crypto scammers have marketed coins to the public, raked in money and then fled before prices fell, leaving ordinary investors with big losses. Trump promises to end the government’s “war on crypto.” Industry executives want legislation that would strip authority from the S.E.C. and transfer oversight of digital currencies to a smaller, less aggressive agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That would have two likely effects. First, it would signal to scammers that they won’t be policed as closely. They could then create more risky coins and market them aggressively to unsuspecting investors. Second, it might pave the way for legitimate banks and investment firms to offer more products tied to crypto. Right now, you have to set up a complicated digital wallet and learn a new financial system to buy most cryptocurrencies. Some Wall Street firms think it should be easier. They want to create special investment funds that contain crypto and then sell you shares. You could buy the shares — even keep them in your retirement account or your kid’s college savings fund — just like ordinary stocks. Several companies already offer this type of product tied to Bitcoin. (When Bitcoin’s price falls, the value of the shares falls, too.) The S.E.C. has discouraged financial firms from doing the same with other cryptocurrencies, arguing that it would expose ordinary investors to the risks of a market crash. Trump’s allies hope all that is about to change. A national Bitcoin stockpile In a speech in Nashville last summer, Trump promised to create a “national Bitcoin stockpile.” It’s not entirely clear what he meant. But influential crypto executives want the new administration to hold Bitcoin the way it holds oil and gold, in “strategic reserve.” They argue that, as Bitcoin rises, the investment will help erode the $36 trillion national debt and ensure U.S. dominance if the global economy someday runs on cryptocurrencies. Last month, Trump asked a task force to study the possibility. But if the Treasury held Bitcoin, the next crash wouldn’t just clean out a few day traders. It might upend the nation’s finances. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration A steel shop in Canada. Ian Willms for The New York Times Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, to start today. He also ordered the Treasury secretary to stop minting pennies. Trump plans to revoke the security clearances of two people who brought cases against him. Trump’s attacks on clean energy policies threaten investments and manufacturing jobs in Republican districts. A Trump executive order declared South Africa’s white Afrikaners victims of racial injustice, a disputed claim often advanced in the country using false or exaggerated stories. The order offered Afrikaners refugee status and halted aid to South Africa. More on the Government Trump’s early moves to slash the federal government and expand American territory represent significant ideological swings from his first term, Peter Baker writes. “I’ve been going through the stages of grief,” said one of the workers hit in the Trump administration’s purge of federal agencies. Read others’ stories. War in Ukraine Stephen Hubbard in a Moscow court last year. Moscow City Court Press Service, via Associated Press A retired American teacher was traveling in Ukraine when Russia invaded. He has become an unlikely pawn in war. Russian forces have illegally swept thousands of Ukrainians civilians into prisons during their advance, The Washington Post reports. More International News Israel’s military withdrew from a corridor dividing Gaza, leaving the enclave’s north as required by the cease-fire with Hamas. Dominique Pelicot, jailed for drugging his wife and inviting dozens of men to rape her, is suspected in similar crimes years earlier. One is a murder case. In central India, government forces killed dozens of Maoist guerrillas. The leftist insurgency has ebbed and flowed for decades. Other Big Stories Some companies, bracing for lawsuits encouraged by Trump, are “rainbow-hushing”: quietly dropping or rebranding their D.E.I. programs. A Georgia man was sentenced to 475 years in prison for dogfighting and animal cruelty after authorities found 107 dogs, many injured and malnourished, chained in his yard. A manufacturer recalled around two million baked goods, including some doughnuts sold at Dunkin’, over listeria contamination concerns. Opinions Israel freed the man who killed Meytal Ofer’s father as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange with Hamas. It was the right decision, she writes. Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Trump’s first weeks in office. Here are columns by David French on populism and M. Gessen on authoritarianism. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Born that way: How much does breed shape a dog’s health and behavior? A mystery solved: Her brother disappeared in World War II. She finally got to say goodbye. Metropolitan Diary: Fulfilling a vow, 50 years later. Work Friend: Worn out by an extrovert? Try being boring. Lives Lived: Gyalo Thondup was a prominent political operator in Tibet and the eldest brother of the Dalai Lama. For decades, he pushed for paths to allow his brother — exiled since 1959 — to return to the territory. Thondup died at 97. SUPER BOWL The Philadelphia Eagles’ cornerback, Cooper DeJean. Doug Mills/The New York Times Super Bowl: Philadelphia’s defensive line helped the team beat the defending champions Kansas City in a 40-22 blowout, sacking Patrick Mahomes six times. Read a recap. M.V.P.: The Eagles’ quarterback, Jalen Hurts, earned the game’s Most Valuable Player award. Next year’s odds: The Super Bowl champs are favored to repeat. For more Travis Kelce wore Amiri. Chris Graythen/Getty Images Super Bowl players dressed up to arrive at the stadium. See the best looks. President Trump attended the game, the first sitting president to do so. ARTS AND IDEAS Kendrick Lamar Doug Mills/The New York Times Kendrick Lamar was the first rapper to headline the N.F.L.’s Super Bowl halftime show solo. He made his diss track about Drake, “Not Like Us,” the centerpiece of his set at the expense of a larger statement, Jon Caramanica writes. “It was quite a spectacle — perhaps the peak of any rap battle, ever.” Read more about the performance, which included an appearance from Serena Williams. Related: Drake is suing Universal Music Group for defamation and harassment over the song, which he says falsely accuses him of being a pedophile. More on culture People are drinking more whole milk. Theater crews across Off Broadway are unionizing. Producers worry that the move will increase costs in a sector still wounded from the pandemic. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich. Bathe caramelized mushrooms in honey and butter, then eat them with udon noodles. Track your fitness over time. Watch these movies on Netflix. Charge your phone in the car. Snag a Valentine’s Day deal. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were filename and inflame. Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. And we recommend the new Sports Edition of Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 12, 2025 Author Members Posted February 12, 2025 February 11, 2025 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering a new report on schools after the pandemic — as well Trump’s executive power, climate change funding and golden retrievers. Adam Perez for The New York Times ‘Paying the price’ Schoolchildren in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about half a year behind typical pre-Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three-quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, it is close to a full year. This morning, a group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss, and it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state. School closures during Covid set children back, and most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground. One reason is a rise in school absences that has continued long after Covid stopped dominating daily life. “The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of the research team, told me. In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four points from the report, with charts created by my colleague Ashley Wu. I’ll also tell you the researchers’ recommendations for what schools should do now. 1. State variation The new report — from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford — compares performance across states, based on math and reading tests that fourth and eighth graders take. (A separate report, on national trends, came out last month.) Today’s report shows a wide variety of outcomes. In the states that have made up the most ground, fourth and eighth graders were doing nearly as well last spring as their predecessors were doing five years earlier. But the overall picture is not good. In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year. Here are the changes in reading performance: Source: Education Recovery Scorecard | By The New York Times 2. A blue-red divide Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions during the pandemic. Many public schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year — from the spring of 2020 until the spring of 2021. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remained closed for only the spring of 2020. This pattern helps explains a partisan gap in learning loss: Students in blue states have lost more ground since 2019. The differences are especially large in math. Eight of the 10 states that have lost the most ground since 2019 voted Democratic in recent presidential elections. And eight of the 10 states with the smallest math shortfalls voted Republican. Source: Education Recovery Scorecard | By The New York Times I know some readers may wonder if blue states had bigger declines simply because they started from a higher point. After all, the states with the best reading and math scores have long been mostly blue. But that doesn’t explain the post-pandemic patterns. For example, New Jersey (a blue state) and Utah (a red state) both had high math scores in 2019, but New Jersey has fared much worse since then. 3. More inequality Pandemic learning loss has exacerbated class gaps and racial gaps. Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students. “Children, especially poor children, are paying the price for the pandemic,” Kane said. Other research, by Rebecca Jack of the University of Nebraska and Emily Oster of Brown, points to two core reasons. First, schools with a large number of poor students and Black or Latino students were more likely to remain closed for long periods of time. Second, a day of missed school tends to have a larger effect on disadvantaged students than others. In the years before Covid, the U.S. education system had impressive success in reducing learning inequality, as I explained in a 2022 newsletter. But Covid erased much of that progress. “Educational inequality grew during the pandemic and remains larger now than in 2019,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the new report, said. 4. How to recover The authors of the report note that some school districts, including in poorer areas, have largely recovered from Covid learning loss. Among the standouts are Compton, Calif.; Ector County, Texas, which includes Odessa; Union City, N.J.; and Rapides Parish, La. The authors urge more study of these districts to understand what they’re doing right. Early evidence suggests that after-school tutoring and summer school, subsidized by federal aid, made a difference. Intensive efforts to reduce absenteeism can also help. One problem, the authors write, is that many schools have not been honest with parents about learning loss: “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected.” THE LATEST NEWS Trump’s Executive Power A federal judge said that the White House had defied his order to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal grants. The ruling sets up a power struggle between the judicial and executive branches. Many of President Trump’s orders seem to violate laws. Some legal scholars argue that the U.S. is in the early stages of a constitutional crisis. Trump often muses about running for a third term, which the Constitution does not allow. He tells advisers it’s a tactic to grab attention and irritate Democrats A judge intervened in Trump’s order to halt medical research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The judge restored the funding in 22 states. The government told the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s leading climate science agencies, to identify grants related to global warming. Some are afraid it will cancel the grants. The White House insulated Elon Musk’s cost-cutting effort, known as DOGE, from public records requests. Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics. Trump’s Tariffs A wholesale steel market in Shenyang, China. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum imports from any country. Domestic steel manufacturers, who struggle to compete with cheap foreign metals, welcomed the tariffs. The move will hit China particularly hard. Trump enacted similar tariffs in his first term. Studies found they helped U.S. metal makers but hurt the broader economy because of higher prices. More on Trump The Justice Department will dismiss the corruption case against Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor. Adams, a Democrat, curried favor with Trump for months. Google Maps has renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America for users in the United States. Senators advanced the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, making it likely that she will be confirmed tomorrow. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators. The agency’s new director shuttered it over the weekend. An ICE raid gutted a town in Nebraska during Trump’s first term. Now, many fear a repeat, The Washington Post reports. Middle East Hamas indefinitely postponed its next release of Israeli hostages. This imperils the six-week cease-fire in the war with Israel. Freed Israeli hostages have told stories of abuse. They say some hostages held by Hamas in Gaza are bound, starved, wounded and tortured. Trump said that if the U.S. took over Gaza, Palestinians would not be allowed to return. And he threatened to cut aid to Jordan and Egypt if they did not go along. International Men disguised as police officers kidnapped Ronald Ojeda. Video Obtained Via CHS Noticias Chile found a Venezuelan dissident’s body buried in concrete. Officials there believe that the Maduro government had him killed. Thousands of tremors, sometimes minutes apart, have struck the Greek island of Santorini in recent weeks. Most inhabitants and tourists have left in fear of a bigger quake. Construction work uncovered more than 150 unexploded World War II-era bombs under a children’s playground in northern England. Crime A Manhattan jury convicted three men of murder for drugging and robbing patrons of gay bars and clubs and luring them to their deaths. They seduced the victims, stole their phones and drained their credit cards. A man has been charged in the 2003 murder of an 88-year-old woman on Long Island after new technology helped match his thumbprint to one found at the scene. Other Big Stories Musk and a group of investors made a $97 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. OpenAI’s C.E.O., whom Musk has feuded with, mocked the offer. More than 150 scientists compiled a report on the state of America’s land, water and wildlife. Now they’re trying to publish it, against the White House’s wishes. Two storms are set to bring snow to Chicago and the Mid-Atlantic this week. Opinions The so-called Department of Government Efficiency will erode public trust in the Treasury if it selectively suspends payments, five former Treasury secretaries write. PEPFAR funding has allowed eight million babies to be born AIDS-free. As a pro-life official, Marco Rubio should protect the program, four anti-abortion activists write. Here are columns by Thomas Edsall on Trump’s enemies and Michelle Goldberg on JD Vance’s attitudes to racism. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Boujee, a prizewinning golden retriever. Callaghan O’Hare for The New York Times Westminster Dog Show: Can a golden retriever win? History says no. Ask Well: “Should dinner be the smallest meal of the day?” Valentine’s Day: A children’s author recommends books about love that won’t make you cringe. Ask Vanessa: “What can I wear to a job interview besides a boring suit?” Most clicked yesterday: The 50 best movies on Netflix right now. Lives Lived: Monica Getz was married to the jazz star Stan Getz for 24 tumultuous years, during which he battled addiction and physically abused her. She devoted herself to reforming divorce laws and supporting other women like her. She died at 90. SPORTS N.B.A.: Luka Dončić debuted for the Los Angeles Lakers after his trade from the Dallas Mavericks, scoring 14 points in a win over the Utah Jazz. Super Bowl: The Eagles’ win over the Chiefs drew a projected 126 million viewers, Fox Sports said, a record for the game. Halftime show: A performer who was part of Kendrick Lamar’s act will be banned from all N.F.L. stadiums and events for life after unfurling a flag bearing the words “Sudan” and “Gaza” during the show. ARTS AND IDEAS Linn Fritz Ratings are critical to the television business; they help determine how much media companies can charge for commercials. But people now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways that the industry can no longer agree on the best measurement. Read about the scramble for a solution. More on culture Fox acquired a company, Red Seat Ventures, behind conservative and true crime podcasts. Charlie Kirk has become the youth whisperer of the American right. John Oliver interrupted Jon Stewart’s monologue on “The Daily Show.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … David Malosh for The New York Times Make this classic shrimp scampi, which has over 15,000 ratings. Find a creative (and cheap) Valentine’s Day gift. Soothe your kid to sleep with these tips. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was clutched. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. And we recommend the new Sports Edition of Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 13, 2025 Author Members Posted February 13, 2025 February 12, 2025 By German Lopez and Lyna Bentahar Good morning. We’re covering two of Trump’s most controversial nominees — as well as Elon Musk, the Middle East and the Westminster Dog Show. Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel. Eric Lee/The New York Times; Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Two loyalists Today, the Senate is poised to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. And tomorrow, it is likely to advance Kash Patel’s nomination to run the F.B.I. These are two of President Trump’s most controversial nominees. What do they have in common? They are both exceedingly loyal to the president. They both believe partisanship has poisoned the civil service. And they both promise to promote unconventional views on Trump’s behalf. Gabbard left the Democratic Party in 2022 and aligned herself with Trump. She endorsed his preferred candidates for that year’s midterms and became a Trump-friendly regular on Fox News. Patel wrote a memoir in 2023, “Government Gangsters,” about the supposed “deep state” arrayed against Trump and three books for children that cast Trump as a king. Trump’s critics say Gabbard and Patel are sycophants, unqualified for these jobs. Trump’s supporters say their views have been misconstrued. Today’s newsletter explains the two nominees’ backgrounds, the controversies surrounding them and what they could do in power. At a Las Vegas Trump rally. Doug Mills/The New York Times Tulsi Gabbard Her background: Gabbard has been in the Army for nearly 22 years. She served two tours in the Middle East and one in Africa. From 2013 to 2021, she was a Democratic member of the House, representing a district in Hawaii. She’s still in the Army Reserve. The controversy: Gabbard’s critics say that she’s friendly with America’s adversaries, particularly Russia. She blamed the United States for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggesting that NATO’s expansionism had antagonized Vladimir Putin. She met with Bashar al-Assad of Syria in 2017 while he was quashing a revolt against his dictatorship. (She later argued he was not an enemy of the United States.) She has supported Edward Snowden, a contractor who illegally leaked classified U.S. intelligence and then fled to Russia. Gabbard says that she is simply skeptical of America’s interventionist foreign policy and unchecked surveillance powers. But critics say it is possible to hold those views without consistently standing up for the country’s enemies. Gabbard also believes that the intelligence community is corrupt and politically weaponized. She has pointed to genuine scandals, such as the F.B.I.’s use of surveillance powers to spy on a Trump campaign adviser in 2016. But she also claimed, without evidence, that the intelligence community undermined reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop to help Joe Biden win in 2020. What she could do: Gabbard says she wants to make intelligence agencies more transparent, shut down programs that she views as unconstitutional and allow more dissenters to express their disagreements with leaders. She could also use her position to try to hamper interventionist policies abroad and intelligence operations against Russia. What’s next: The Senate will vote on Gabbard’s nomination today. If confirmed, she will oversee U.S. spy agencies. Patel with President Trump. Doug Mills/The New York Times Kash Patel His background: Patel was a federal prosecutor for three years. During Trump’s first term, he was the defense secretary’s chief of staff. The controversy: Patel has espoused conspiracy theories in support of the president. He has defended QAnon, a group that falsely claims that Trump is battling a cabal of satanist, child-molesting Democrats and power-hungry bureaucrats. And Patel has said that Biden stole the 2020 election. His book argues for using the powers of the presidency to go after Trump’s critics. His memoir included an appendix titled “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” which names possible targets who have or had government jobs. The Trump administration “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” Patel said in 2023, referring to people who obstructed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Patel is an unusual choice for F.B.I. director. Presidents typically nominate people who rise through the bureau or other police agencies, vowing to protect the nonpartisan aspect of law enforcement. What he could do: Patel has said that he’ll fire “corrupt agents” who worked on Jan. 6 cases. (The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee said yesterday that Patel had directed firings at the bureau, even though the Senate had not yet confirmed him.) Patel could push the F.B.I. to investigate Trump’s critics, making their lives difficult even if the investigations don’t lead to formal charges. He told a Senate panel that he would ignore politics and follow the law. What’s next: The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on Patel’s nomination tomorrow. After that, he will get a full vote in the Senate. THE LATEST NEWS Elon Musk In the Oval Office. Eric Lee/The New York Times In the Oval Office, Elon Musk, accompanied by his 4-year-old son, answered questions for the first time since his arrival in Washington. He claimed without evidence that the federal government was filled with corruption. Trump signed an executive order to give Musk’s government-slashing team, DOGE, vast reach over the shape of the Civil Service. It also directs agency officials to plan for “large scale” cuts to their work force. Musk’s team announced it was cutting nearly a billion dollars in grants and contracts from the Education Department, largely targeting research. Many of the top employees Trump has fired were involved with investigations into Musk’s companies. The Trump administration fired FEMA officials after Musk claimed, misleadingly, that the agency had used disaster relief funds to house migrants in luxury hotels. See where Trump and Musk have cut federal workers so far. For the coming weeks, The New York Times is devoting its On Politics newsletter to covering Musk. Sign up here to follow along. Presidential Power Speaker Mike Johnson said he agreed that Trump could cut federal spending without congressional approval. This contradicts the Constitution’s separation of powers. Trump is using his power to shape New York City’s future. He wants to kill bike lanes. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned about the limits of presidential power and expressed concern that government officials might ignore court rulings. More on Trump Religious groups sued the Department of Homeland Security over a new policy that permits arrests of immigrants inside houses of worship. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is preparing to visit Trump. Modi hopes to reduce friction by cooperating on trade and with U.S. deportation efforts. The Associated Press said one of its reporters was barred from an Oval Office event because the outlet referred to the Gulf of Mexico, instead of saying “Gulf of America,” as Trump ordered. A federal judge halted Trump’s effort to cut $4 billion in research funding for universities, cancer centers and hospitals. Another judge froze part of the plan earlier on Monday. Middle East At a White House meeting, the king of Jordan rebuffed Trump’s proposal for his country to absorb Palestinians living in Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu told Hamas that Israel would resume fighting in Gaza if the group did not release hostages by Saturday. The Palestinian Authority, in an overture to Trump, ended a yearslong practice of paying the families of Palestinians jailed or killed by Israel. Russia and Ukraine Marc Fogel and President Trump. Eric Lee/The New York Times Russia freed Marc Fogel, an American teacher held captive for more than three years. Fogel then met Trump at the White House. Intense fighting is happening in the Kursk region of Russia. Both sides want control of the area ahead of expected peace talks. Business Financial firms are rolling back their D.E.I. initiatives. One, Goldman Sachs, will drop its rule that corporate boards it advises must include women and minorities. In Silicon Valley, one of the least churchgoing parts of America, Christianity is becoming more popular — thanks in part to the growing influence of Peter Thiel. Other Big Stories Salman Rushdie testified in the trial of the man accused of stabbing him and blinding him in one eye. “It occurred to me quite clearly that I was dying,” he recalled. In a graphic speech on the House floor, Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican, accused her former fiancé and three other men of having drugged and raped her and other women. Her former fiancé has denied the accusations. Italian police officers arrested 181 people believed to be affiliated with an infamous Sicilian mafia. Opinions We don’t have a border crisis; we have a labor crisis. The real villains aren’t migrants — they’re the politicians and corporations who profit from instability, Greisa Martínez Rosas argues. France is in decline, David Broder argues. The country’s social model is foundering, and the far right is taking advantage. Here are columns by Bret Stephens on the destruction of Hamas and Thomas Friedman on Trump’s Gaza proposal. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS A male Paradisaea rubra, or red bird of paradise. Rene Martin/American Museum of Natural History Birds of paradise: They glow when they’re mating. Ozempic: Weight loss drugs may protect against Alzheimer’s. Being American: This man won birthright citizenship for all. Get some rest: People who work night shifts tend to have sleep problems. Experts have advice. Most clicked yesterday: John Oliver interrupted Jon Stewart’s monologue on “The Daily Show.” Lives Lived: Maria Teresa Horta was the last survivor of the celebrated Portuguese writers known as the “Three Marias,” who together wrote a landmark 1972 book that alerted the world to repression in the country. Horta died at 87. SPORTS N.F.L.: The Saints hired the Eagles’ offensive coordinator, Kellen Moore, as their head coach, ending the offseason coaching cycle. N.H.L.: The inaugural 4 Nations Face-Off begins tonight. Canada has a goalie problem. Soccer: The American star Weston McKennie had an astounding shot for Juventus against P.S.V. Eindhoven. See the goal. ARTS AND IDEAS Monty Graham Dickie/The New York Times Monty, a regal giant schnauzer with a dramatic beard, won best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. He defeated a tough crowd of canine competitors that included an extremely silky Shih Tzu named Comet and a rugged German shepherd named Mercedes. Related: Boujee, the top-ranked golden retriever, did not win (as we said in a previous newsletter, it’s tough out there for the goldens). More on culture Demi Moore Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times Demi Moore is about to attend her first Oscars as a nominee. She spoke to The Times about the role that revitalized her career. Netflix thought “Emilia Pérez” might deliver its first best picture Oscar. Social media posts by the lead actress have complicated its chances. Jimmy Kimmel joked about Trump’s hatred of paper straws. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Yossy Arefi. Bake a chocolate cheesecake with a raspberry swirl. Ski in Japan. Create the perfect hair bun. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was handout. Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. And we recommend the new Sports Edition of Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —German and Lyna Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 14, 2025 Author Members Posted February 14, 2025 February 13, 2025 Good morning. Today, my colleague Emily Bazelon explores presidential power. We’re also covering migrants at Guantánamo, Vladimir Putin and rumination. —David Leonhardt President Trump signing orders. Eric Lee/The New York Times Purse strings By Emily Bazelon I cover legal issues. Perhaps the biggest legal test of President Trump’s term so far turns on a basic question: Can the president override Congress and cancel federal funding? Because he disagrees with spending goals already set by law, Trump’s administration has nixed grants and closed agencies that were doing work the legislative branch authorized. The Constitution says only Congress can make those calls. In a couple of cases, federal judges have told the administration to release the money. One suit, brought by Democratic state attorneys general, will probably land at the Supreme Court. Today’s newsletter will guide you through the dispute over “impoundment,” or efforts by the executive branch to hold back money Congress wants to spend. What the founders wanted According to Article I of the Constitution, Congress passes laws to spend money — appropriations bills. Some of these let the president decide how and when to spend the funds through executive agencies. But a lot of funding comes with specific instructions. Presidents generally can’t cancel such spending unilaterally — that’s fundamental to the separation of powers. “Where the purse is lodged in one branch, and the sword in another, there can be no danger” of an all-powerful president, Alexander Hamilton said at the convention to ratify the Constitution in New York. Presidents have generally respected the line the framers drew. When they spent less than Congress allotted, it was often because Congress set a ceiling (“a sum not exceeding”) rather than requiring the whole amount to be spent. In 1803, for instance, Thomas Jefferson saved money when he didn’t need all of a $50,000 appropriation for gun boats. In other instances, presidents impounded funds to save money and effectively reached an agreement with Congress. The exception to the rule is Richard Nixon, who had a sharp confrontation with Congress. He impounded billions appropriated to build waste treatment plants that would reduce pollution. Both Congress and the Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s gambit. Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which forbade future impoundments with only narrow exceptions. And the court unanimously ruled that Nixon had no authority to spend less than Congress had allotted. A rising revolt Over the years, conservative frustration mounted over the ballooning federal budget. Congress tried to give the president a line-item veto to cancel specific programs out of a bill, but the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional. An opposing view of executive power, argued in an article co-written by the lawyer who is now counsel for the White House budget office, holds that presidents have always impounded funds in the way that Nixon did because they sometimes spend less than authorized. In this view, it doesn’t matter whether they did it to save money or to scrap a reviled program. As a result, the Trump administration lawyer Mark Paoletta and his co-authors argue, the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. Legal scholars point out that these were not examples of presidential actions that defy Congress. They mostly involved presidents and Congress accommodating each other, often to save money, muddling through rather than a president cutting off funds over a policy disagreement, as Trump apparently did with educational research that Elon Musk’s team said it canceled this week, for instance. The Supreme Court But that’s probably not the point. The Trump administration seems intent on outcomes, not theories — on asserting broad executive authority and expecting Congress to roll over. The state attorneys general who have sued to unfreeze funds are checking Trump’s power from outside Washington. How would the Supreme Court rule on an impoundment challenge? The justices decided a relevant case last spring. In a 7-to-2 ruling, the court rejected a challenge to the funding Congress provided for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which Trump has just unilaterally closed, the subject of another lawsuit). Justice Clarence Thomas opened his majority opinion by declaring that “our Constitution gives Congress control over the public fisc.” He added later that by the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, “the principle of legislative supremacy over fiscal matters engendered little debate and created no disagreement.” Related: What happens when Elon Musk comes to your door? The New York Times On Politics newsletter will focus on Musk for the coming weeks. THE LATEST NEWS Russia and Ukraine Vladimir Putin Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik Trump said he had started negotiations with Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. Trump also spoke with Volodymyr Zelensky. European leaders have demanded that talks between Trump and Putin include Ukraine. Ukraine hopes to regain the territory Russia has seized since 2014, including Crimea. At a NATO meeting, Pete Hegseth, the U.S. defense secretary, called that goal unrealistic. The Trump administration will free a Russian cybercriminal as part of a prisoner exchange that led to the release of an American schoolteacher. North Korea is treating wounded Russian soldiers and hosting Russia’s orphaned children. Trump’s Government Overhaul A federal judge said the Trump administration’s buyout program for federal workers could proceed. Officials say at least 75,000 workers have applied, and the government closed it to new entrants. Musk’s allies have accused journalists of “doxxing” for writing about members of his government-slashing DOGE team. The board members of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, all Trump appointees, elected Trump as its chairman and fired its longtime president. Some nonprofits are unable to get money from federal grants for local projects, such as wildfire prevention in Montana, that past administrations promised. More on the Trump Administration The Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence, 52 to 48. Mitch McConnell broke ranks to vote against her confirmation. Senators also advanced the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary. His confirmation vote could be today. The State Department plans to spend $400 million on armored vehicles from Tesla, which Musk owns. Gulf of America The Associated Press accused the White House of violating the First Amendment for barring reporters from three press events in recent days. The news organization has refused to use the term Gulf of America. The Encyclopaedia Britannica also said it would not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Immigration At Guantánamo Bay in 2019. Doug Mills/The New York Times The Trump administration sent dozens of Venezuelan migrants to a base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that previously held Al Qaeda suspects. Troops, not immigration officers, are guarding them. Trump’s moves to pause refugee resettlement, including for those already approved, have left people stranded in dangerous contexts. Read one family’s story. More on Politics Eric Adams, New York City’s Democratic mayor, has quietly explored running for re-election as a Republican. House Republicans released their initial budget plan. It includes deep cuts to Medicaid and trillions in tax cuts. Deb Haaland, who was Joe Biden’s interior secretary, is running for governor of New Mexico. Two New Hampshire high-school students are challenging Trump’s executive order barring trans girls from competing on girls’ sports teams. Google says it stopped displaying cultural events like Black History Month on its calendar app because maintaining them manually wasn’t sustainable. Business and Economy U.S. inflation rose in January to 3 percent, higher than expected. The wholesale price of eggs is on the rise, and so is the cost of restaurant breakfast specials. Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil and gas company, plans to cut up to 20 percent of its workers worldwide. Honda and Nissan scrapped a major merger. Health A measles outbreak in West Texas has sickened 22 children and two adults. The state has declining childhood vaccination rates. A study found that weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy can also help reduce alcohol cravings. This flu season has been particularly bad. Rates remain high in much of the country, at a time when the virus usually wanes. Other Big Stories A storm is set to bring heavy rain or snow to California. Officials fear that neighborhoods scarred by wildfires could now suffer mudslides. A woman who had been missing for months gave birth on the New York subway. A passenger took a video of the baby girl. Opinions Republicans who want tax cuts are out of touch. Americans want tax increases — on the wealthy, Oren Cass writes. Chrystia Freeland, a candidate for prime minister of Canada, argues that new U.S. tariffs on Canadian aluminum will hurt both countries. Here is a column by Nicholas Kristof on U.S.A.I.D. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS In Prague. Emin Sansar/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images Natural builders: A government’s dam project stalled. Beavers got it done. Wellness: How to stop ruminating. Fake IDs: They’ve gotten really, really good. Most clicked: For two days in a row, our most clicked story has been about John Oliver interrupting Jon Stewart’s monologue on “The Daily Show.” (We’ll tell you tomorrow if the streak continues.) Lives Lived: David Edward Byrd captured the swirl and energy of the 1960s and early ’70s with indelible posters for concerts by Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Rolling Stones, as well as for hit stage musicals like “Godspell.” He died at 83. SPORTS Hockey: Canada beat Sweden in overtime, 4-3, in a thrilling start to a new tournament, the 4 Nations Face-Off. M.L.B.: The former Astros infielder Alex Bregman agreed to a three-year, $120 million contract with the Red Sox, ending a prolonged free agency. College football: A U.N.L.V. offensive lineman, Ben Christman, was found dead in his apartment, the university announced. He was just 21. ARTS AND IDEAS An old brochure. Cove Poconos Resorts When a hotel in Pennsylvania closed recently, it stranded more than a dozen heart-shaped bath tubs. These tubs proliferated during the sexual revolution, but by the late 1990s, Americans were falling out of love with them. Read about what the rise and fall of the heart-shaped tub says about romance in America. More on culture An Eagles fan brought a Patrick Mahomes voodoo doll to the Super Bowl. A video of her stabbing it has gone viral, Vice reports. With “Emilia Pérez” hobbled, “Anora” looks revitalized: Read about where the Oscar race stands. Elon Musk took his son to the Oval Office, so Jimmy Fallon walked onstage with a child, too. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Hadas Smirnoff. Make a veggie-rich miso-Parmesan noodle soup for one. Prepare for your digital afterlife. Upgrade a car’s air filtration for less than $20. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was payment. Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. And we recommend the new Sports Edition of Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 16, 2025 Author Members Posted February 16, 2025 February 14, 2025 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering America and Europe’s strained relationship — as well as Eric Adams, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Valentine’s Day. Eric Lee/The New York Times Trump and Europe The United States and Europe once seemed like inseparable allies. But three events this week show how the alliance is under strain. First, President Trump ordered his administration yesterday to prepare to raise tariffs on Europe (among others), on top of steel and aluminum tariffs announced earlier this week. European leaders said they would retaliate. Second, Vice President JD Vance visited the continent on Tuesday to declare that America — not Europe, not Asia — would dominate the field of artificial intelligence, as my colleague David Sanger wrote. If Europe wants to benefit, Vance added, it will have to deregulate its economy and welcome U.S. tech companies. Finally, Trump snubbed Europe in Russia-Ukraine peace talks. He began negotiating with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. Trump spoke with Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine only after he got off the phone with Putin. “We, as a sovereign country, simply will not be able to accept any agreements without us,” Zelensky told reporters yesterday. (Later, Trump clarified that Ukraine would be involved in the negotiations.) Europeans felt the insult. NATO defense ministers met this week to discuss the war in Ukraine, but they weren’t consulted or even informed about Trump’s gambit. Times reporters in Europe spent much of yesterday listening to the continent’s leaders fret about the alliance with America. Europe relies on the United States for its security. Its leaders now wonder: Can they depend on Washington? Today’s newsletter explains the new relationship and its consequences. Pete Hegseth Omar Havana/Getty Images Europe’s weakness Since World War II, American leaders have tried to prevent a revival of authoritarianism in Europe. The United States spent exorbitant sums to defeat Nazism, rebuild Europe and defend the continent against the Soviet Union. Trump views the relationship differently. He believes that Europe takes advantage of America’s military and economic strength. NATO members are supposed to spend at least 2 percent of their economic output on their militaries. Most lifted their military budgets in recent years to meet that goal, in response to the war in Ukraine and pressure from Trump and Joe Biden. Source: NATO | Data excludes Iceland. | By The New York Times But Trump now argues that 2 percent is not enough. He says European governments should spend 5 percent of their economic output on defense — a standard that no NATO member, not even the United States, currently meets. And he’ll likely ask Europe to take responsibility for Ukraine once the war with Russia is over, my colleague Steven Erlanger wrote. “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a news conference yesterday. Trump also senses weakness across the continent. Europe’s economy lags behind America’s. Three decades ago, the European Union’s G.D.P. per capita, a measure of economic output for each person, was 68 percent of the United States’. Today, it is 50 percent. Trump respects countries that show strength — he often praises China, for example — and, in his view, Europe is withering. Source: World Bank | By The New York Times For Europe’s leaders, this all seems unfair. They just spent a decade drastically raising their military spending, only for Trump to move the goal posts. And while Europe has economic problems, it remains one of the world’s three largest economies. China’s strength The biggest winner of a U.S.-Europe rift could be China. Many analysts believe Washington and Beijing are already locked into a new cold war. China has several advantages in this conflict: By some measures, its economy is already bigger than America’s. And it has four times the population. The United States can make up those differences by joining with other countries. That’s why American diplomats have tried to build stronger ties with Australia, Japan, South Korea and India in recent years. Europe plays a role in countering China, too. Trump, however, does not see the world in such terms. His America First vision demands that the United States dominate the world and benefit from its riches. If that vision were to get other countries to bend the knee to the United States, it could work. But it could also push some U.S. allies closer to China. If they come to believe America is an unreliable trading or military partner, they could go to the next superpower around for deals. In that case, Trump’s approach could backfire. For more JD Vance told The Wall Street Journal that Russia could face more sanctions and U.S. military action if it doesn’t agree to peace. “We do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence,” he said. Zelensky said that Russia’s military had struck a building at Chernobyl with a drone. World leaders are gathering in Munich today. THE LATEST NEWS Eric Adams Danielle Sassoon Kent Nishimura for The New York Times The U.S. attorney in Manhattan and several officials in Washington resigned over the Justice Department’s order to drop the corruption case against Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor. Emil Bove, the Justice Department official who ordered the case to be dropped, guided Adams’ defense lawyers as they crafted an argument for dismissing the case. Danielle Sassoon, the Manhattan prosecutor, explained her refusal to drop the Adams case in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached,” she wrote. More on Trump The Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, 52 to 48. Mitch McConnell, who survived polio as a child, was the only Republican to oppose Kennedy. The government continued to lay off people. The human resources division advised agencies to terminate most of the estimated 200,000 workers on probation. A federal judge halted the Trump administration’s plan to cut federal funding for hospitals that offer gender-transition treatments for people under 19. Several artists, including Issa Rae and Renée Fleming, have cut ties with the Kennedy Center after Trump replaced the center’s board and made himself its chairman. Football kickoffs and low-flow toilets: Trump wants to influence spheres of American life beyond the normal boundaries observed by presidents, Peter Baker writes. The Trump administration’s federal funding freeze has created uncertainty among farmers. The National Park Service removed references to transgender people from its Stonewall National Monument website. Immigration A bipartisan coalition in the House passed a bill to toughen penalties for those who try to evade law enforcement near the border. The bill is named for Raul Gonzalez, a U.S. border agent who died in a chase in 2022. The border has been quiet since Trump took office: Apprehensions last week were down 91 percent compared to a year before. Abortion A Texas judge fined a doctor in New York who has been sending abortion pills across the U.S. The case, which is likely to reach the Supreme Court, is a test of the laws that shield abortion providers in several states. Infant mortality increased along with births in most states with abortion bans in the first 18 months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, according to new research. Other Big Stories Photo illustration by Mike McQuade Inside the Murdoch family: Our reporters obtained more than 3,000 pages of documents that reveal betrayals, private messages and a messy court battle over the future of the media empire. Louisiana’s health department said it would no longer use media campaigns or health fairs to promote vaccination against preventable illnesses. Apple and Google restored TikTok to their app stores in the U.S. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, is laying off about 10 percent of its staff, or roughly 1,000 employees. A fire at a luxury hotel under construction in South Korea killed six people and injured 25. All three Fayed brothers, the ex-owners of Harrods, are now accused of sexual assault. Opinions New Yorkers shouldn’t have to choose between only progressive mayoral candidates and Eric Adams. The Democratic Party should offer moderate choices, Nicole Gelinas writes. Trump isn’t a populist; he’s an Ivy League-educated elite waging war on other elites, David Brooks argues. Here’s a column by David French on evangelicals and empathy. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Lauren Martin Film lovers: Whether you adore Valentine’s Day or loathe it, we have movie recommendations for you. Lost dog? This pet detective uses a thermal drone to help find missing pets. Easing the pain: In hospices, bedside performers offer a new kind of care. Dispatch: An ancient English ritual meant to chase away evil spirits and the winter blues is back. Most clicked yesterday: Elon Musk took his son to the Oval Office, so Jimmy Fallon walked onstage with a child, too. (This is the third day in a row our most popular story has been about the late-night hosts). Lives Lived: Jim Guy Tucker was a former governor of Arkansas who was caught up in the long-running investigation that unsuccessfully targeted his predecessor as governor, Bill Clinton. He was 81. SPORTS Hockey: The United States beat Finland, 6-1, in the second match of the inaugural 4 Nations Face-Off. Next up: a game against Canada, the favorites, tomorrow. N.F.L.: The Jets officially informed quarterback Aaron Rodgers that his tenure in New York is over. Also maybe out of a job: Saints QB Derek Carr. N.B.A.: Steph Curry and Sabrina Ionescu will not hold a rematch of their 3-point contest at the All-Star Game this weekend, the league announced. ARTS AND IDEAS In Manhattan. Nico Schinco for The New York Times “Saturday Night Live” will celebrate its 50th anniversary this weekend. Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, is known for his rituals, including a weekly visit to Lattanzi — an unassuming Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan — with the show’s latest celebrity host. Read about the dinners. More on culture Koh Samui, Thailand. Tanveer Badal for The New York Times “The White Lotus” is coming to Thailand. So are the tourists. Lourdes Lopez, the artistic director of the Miami City Ballet, will step down after 13 years. Selena Gomez is releasing an album in collaboration with her fiancé, Benny Blanco, The Cut reports. Late night hosts joked about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Craig Lee for The New York Times Assemble a creamy, classic tiramisù. Avoid Valentine’s Day cynicism. Manage kids’ screen time with an app. Print in 3-D. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were biathlete, habitable and hittable. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. And we recommend the new Sports Edition of Connections. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.—German Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 17, 2025 Author Members Posted February 17, 2025 February 15, 2025 By Melissa Kirsch Good morning. Letters and phone calls may be archaic, but they have lessons for us on how to be better communicators. María Jesús Contreras Love letters A friend told me he recently removed the email app from his phone. “I used to love in the old days, coming home and checking email — there would be new messages!” he rhapsodized. I felt the pang. Not only would there be new messages, but often, in those early days of email, they were actual electronic letters from friends, replete with emotional life updates and unspooling narratives. Before texting, email was an efficient way to communicate, and the way we communicated was in sentences, paragraphs, fully developed thoughts. We hadn’t yet glimpsed the future where “k” or a thumbs-up emoji was considered communication. I’m always excited when people tell me they’ve deleted an app: another tiny reduction in the amount of time those in my orbit will be spending on their phones. Infinitesimal, perhaps, but moving in the right direction. We’re tinkering with these devices that own our attention, we’re taking back a little bit of control. But I’m particularly interested in modifications that can bring back some of the magic of pre-smartphone communication, when letter writing wasn’t quaint and voice mails were miracles. I’ve written about my nostalgia for phone booths, recommending we borrow some of the parameters they provided and bring them into this century (say, containing our private conversations to private spaces). Even if we’re nostalgic for the olden days, it’s hard to reinstitute the old habits. Deleting email from your phone may release you from the compulsion to check it all the time, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to come home to an inbox full of satisfying missives from your friends. Chances are, they’ve been texting you all day, and your inbox is actually full of spam and bills. In an attempt to reduce my phone’s grip on my life, I once suggested to a friend that each time we wanted to send a text to each other, we send a postcard instead. I think we tried this for a week before admitting that it was an inefficient way to chat. I was aware of the art-project nature of the proposition from the outset and didn’t figure our experiment would replace texting, but I hoped that the postcards would be so delightful we’d at least keep a parallel stream of slow communication going. It didn’t happen. A few weeks ago, I placed a phone call to a friend without warning, someone I’d never spoken on the phone with before. It felt a little reckless, a little rude, which made me want to do it even more, because it seems ridiculous that calling someone should be in any way controversial. It should feel wonderful that someone wants to hear your voice, that they were thinking of you and wanted to connect. While I have a few people that I speak to on the phone regularly, most people I consulted view an unbidden phone call as hostile. They assume there’s an emergency if they get a call from someone with whom they don’t have a regular phone relationship. My recent surprise phone call was awkward, as I suspected it might be. People used to have the bandwidth to receive phone calls from anyone at any time, even without caller ID. That skill set has vanished, replaced perhaps by the ability to process multiple group texts blowing up at once. Now, even if it’s someone you are happy to hear from, a surprise call feels a little like someone popping by unannounced in the middle of the night. There are lots of ideas for how to break phone addiction, but not as many for how to regain the romance of what I’m coming to think of as the slow-comms era, the second half of the 20th century when the phone and the mail were our main means of long-distance communication. The ache at the sight of an empty mailbox was, in my memory, more than balanced out by the ecstasy at the letter that finally arrived. It isn’t just the sane cadence of correspondence that we’re missing now, though; it’s the care and attention we gave to it. We sat down and wrote letters and emails. We may have been cooking dinner or folding laundry while we talked on the phone, but we were literally on the hook for the length of the call. Our communication required presence and continued focus on the other person. We can certainly re-establish this kind of concentration with some people — I have a close friend who detests texting, and he’d be thrilled if I dispensed with it in favor of phone calls — but it’s just too efficient to abandon altogether. A more conceivable option is to try to bring the kind of steady presence and full attention I miss to in-person conversations. If the bulk of our remote communication is destined to be mediated by technology, then let’s see how irrelevant we can make our phones when we’re actually together. Turn off alerts, turn off the damn things altogether, and practice really being there. We think we’re naturals at eye contact, at listening before formulating a response, at sitting together in silence. But like phone-call readiness and entertaining voice mail delivery, those skills atrophy too. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV “Paddington in Peru.” Sony Pictures In “Paddington in Peru,” the genial bear “graduates from nuisance to pathfinder, from struggling to fit in to forging his own identity,” our reviewer writes. Read an interview with Ben Whishaw, who voices Paddington. It’s been a big year for Sebastian Stan, with two standout performances — including the role of Donald Trump in “The Apprentice,” which earned him an Oscar nod. Despite being a third sequel, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” is as deliciously satisfying as the original film, Elisabeth Vincentelli writes. The showtime survival drama “Yellowjackets” is back for Season 3. Here’s a primer on where it left off. “Captain America: Brave New World,” which stars Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford, is one of seven movies our critics are talking about this week. Music Drake released a new album: “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaboration with the singer and producer PartyNextDoor. On the record, he only alludes to his rap beef with Kendrick Lamar. Times critics share what they’re excited to hear at Carnegie Hall’s new season, much of which is devoted to celebrating America’s 250th birthday. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced that Outkast, Billy Idol and Oasis are up for induction this year. More Culture In “All Day All Night” at the Whitney, the artist Christine Sun Kim highlights Deaf culture and measures sonic experience beyond the ear. An Afghan German writer’s new book takes on a taboo topic: Ugliness. The ballerina Ashley Bouder bade farewell to the New York City Ballet after 25 years with a performance of “Firebird.” THE LATEST NEWS Eric Adams Mayor Eric Adams at New York’s City Hall last week. Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times Emil Bove, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, signed a request to drop corruption charges against New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, after at least seven prosecutors resigned in protest of the move. The decision now lies with a federal judge in Manhattan. Judges almost always accept government requests to drop charges, though the Adams case could be an exception. The lead prosecutor on Adams’s investigation wrote in his resignation letter to Bove: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” Prominent New York Democrats, including the lieutenant governor and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called on Adams to resign. They accused him of adopting President Trump’s policies to escape legal trouble. Trump Administration The Trump administration’s cuts to the federal work force are expanding: The Energy Department and the E.P.A. laid off hundreds of workers, and the I.R.S. plans to lay off thousands next week. During the campaign, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025. But many of his recent actions mirror proposals in the document. At a security conference in Munich, Vice President JD Vance told European leaders to stop shunning far-right parties. European leaders fear that Trump is giving up leverage to Vladimir Putin before the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine even begin. Trump has discussed plans to rip up the grass in the Rose Garden, an iconic area of the White House, and replace it with a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago. Other Big Stories A Russian drone strike blew a hole in the protective shell around Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident. Radiation levels there appear normal. Hamas released three more Israeli hostages in Gaza, prolonging a fragile cease-fire with Israel that had seemed on the brink of collapse. Planned Parenthood is struggling financially. Patients report failed abortions and inadequate training at clinics across the country. Many Brazilians covet but cannot afford weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. Criminal gangs are stealing from pharmacies to meet the demand. A humpback whale briefly swallowed a man rafting in the waters off Patagonia before spitting him out. The man’s father caught it on video. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. CULTURE CALENDAR ? “The White Lotus”: Another beautiful location. Another collection of wealthy guests and weary employees. Another mysterious crime. Season 3 of this dark comedy from the writer-director Mike White, which begins Sunday on HBO and Max, takes place at a wellness resort on a gem of an island in the Gulf of Thailand. There will be guns, monkeys and beautiful sunsets. This season’s cast includes Walton Goggins, Parker Posey and Lisa of the K-pop group Blackpink. For more: The Times visited the tropical island where this season was filmed and attended the show’s premiere party. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Johnny Miller for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Oatmeal Cookies With Chocolate Chips If you adore the nubby chewiness of oatmeal raisin cookies but don’t think that anything qualifies as dessert if it doesn’t have chocolate, Genevieve Ko has the treat for you: oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips. Made with just enough batter to bind the oats, they’re a perfect showcase for the real star of the show, that generous handful of chocolate chips. Bake these over the weekend so you can nibble them all week long — stashed into lunchboxes, savored as a midafternoon snack, or for dessert, naturally, with a big glass of milk. REAL ESTATE The Willis family in Miami. Saul Martinez for The New York Times The Hunt: A couple with a new baby and new jobs searched Miami for a house to grow into. Which did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $450,000: An 1898 Craftsman bungalow in Colorado Springs; a ranch house in Savannah, Ga.; or a Queen Anne Revival townhouse in Minneapolis. LIVING A torta ahogada. Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times Travel: Spend 36 hours in Guadalajara, Mexico. Word salad: Fine dining menus can make for easy satire. The language used by chefs says as much about us as it does about them, Sam Corbin writes. WFH: Communication on Slack and Zoom can be awkward. Experts shared tips to make things easier. Tradition: Inside fashion’s mysterious silly hat festival. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Tips for better sleep Turning your bedroom into a calming space is more than just an aesthetic endeavor; it can also help you sleep better. Start by banishing the tiny annoyances that draw your attention in the middle of the night, like a squeaky bed frame. Then, think about your sleep preferences — do you sleep hot or cold, on your back or side — and find a mattress, pillows and sheets that suit you. (Many of Wirecutter’s sleep gear recommendations are on sale this weekend.) Finally, the fun part: Little luxuries, like this earthy and fresh lavender mist, can complete the oasis transformation. Sweet dreams. — Brittney Ho GAME OF THE WEEK Alabama’s Chris Youngblood. Wesley Hale/USA Today Sports, via Reuters Con No. 1 Auburn vs. No. 2 Alabama, men’s college basketball: Before today, the football-obsessed Southeastern Conference had never had a top-two matchup in basketball. How exciting, then, that the conference’s first is this showdown between in-state rivals. Auburn and Alabama have the two best offenses in the country, The Athletic’s Brendan Marks writes, which means this game isn’t just historic — it should also be really exciting. Today at 4 p.m. Eastern on ESPN NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was lexicon. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. And we recommend the new Sports Edition of Connections. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 17, 2025 Author Members Posted February 17, 2025 February 16, 2025 Good morning. Today, my colleague Jason Zinoman is writing about the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live.” We’re also covering Trump, India and internet brain rot. —David Leonhardt Jane Curtin and Chevy Chase in 1976. Owen Franken/Corbis, via Getty Images Life, from New York By Jason Zinoman I write The Times’s On Comedy column. Like “Saturday Night Live,” I turn 50 this year. In fact, I was born only one week after its premiere, which means that along with being a comedy revolution, a career launchpad and a pop culture juggernaut, the show is also a good way for me to keep track of time. Every cast represents a different era in my life. I missed the storied original group — including Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin, both of whom will appear on a prime-time 50th anniversary special tonight — as I was busy learning how to walk, talk and eat solid food. And yet its jokes (“It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping”) were repeated in my house enough to make their way into my consciousness. It wasn’t until I was 10 that I stayed up to watch “S.N.L.,” during the strange and spectacular season starring Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest. I was the perfect age to appreciate Martin Short’s Ed Grimley, a giddy, prancing innocent who exuded the nervous energy of childhood. But it was the next hit era, featuring Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks and Dana Carvey, that got me hooked on sketch comedy. The cable-access spoof “Wayne’s World” showed up just after puberty. Perfect timing. Mike Myers and Dana Carvey during a “Wayne’s World” skit in 2015. Dana Edelson/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images Just as teenagers rebel against their parents, “S.N.L.” fans eventually start rolling their eyes at the show. In my 20s, I first indulged in the popular tradition of loudly lamenting that it wasn’t as funny as it used to be. I stopped watching and missed some of the best years of Chris Farley and Adam Sandler. I returned for the Tina Fey era, which ended in my 30s, and became a devoted fan of the cast that featured Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig and Andy Sandberg. In recent years, the perspective and mellowing of middle age have helped me enjoy some less-than-perfect seasons. Yet my kids watch those same episodes with an excited fandom and snorting exasperation that I can no longer muster. The celebration of half a century of “Saturday Night Live” is a major event because the show transcends comedy. More than 26 million people watched its 40th anniversary special. This one feels even more significant, one of the last gasps of the monoculture. “S.N.L.” has been culturally relevant for so long that it’s woven into the background of our lives — continually reinventing itself, always there. The New York Times has tried to capture its impact on the culture in the past few weeks. We’ve singled out the show’s 13 greatest ad parodies, its 38 most important musical moments and 50 catchphrases it has ushered into our vocabulary. I explored how its cast members’ extensive history of breaking character has become an unlikely signature of its sketch comedy. Cast members breaking character over the years. “S.N.L.” spans generations, and tonight’s anniversary show reflects that. The special will feature former cast members Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell and Bill Murray; guest hosts Dave Chappelle, Kim Kardashian and Robert DeNiro; and musical guests Bad Bunny, Paul McCartney and Sabrina Carpenter. And these are just the announced stars. Expect familiar characters (fingers crossed for Ed Grimley) and surprises. I doubt Donald Trump will show up, but I bet there will be at least one impression of him. Last night, NBC aired the first-ever episode of “Saturday Night Live” from Oct. 11, 1975. It made for a revealing bookend, an illustration of how a scrappy, countercultural show has become the sturdiest, most powerful comedy institution in the history of television. More coverage “I don’t feel I’m done”: Lorne Michaels, 80, has shaped comedy for half a century. He spoke with The Times about his legacy. Mary Ellen Matthews has photographed 25 years of “S.N.L.” hosts. The show’s news parody, Weekend Update, has launched comedy careers and caused controversy. Al Franken, Michael Che and others recount its history. Listen to eight fans of eight different eras of the show explain what makes their favorite the best. THE LATEST NEWS Foreign Policy President Trump and Marco Rubio in the Oval Office. Eric Lee/The New York Times Secretary of State Marco Rubio and two top Trump aides plan to meet with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia to discuss a path to ending the war in Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky, in a closed-door meeting, rejected a demand by the Trump administration to give up half of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for U.S. support. Rubio met with Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem in the wake of Trump’s proposal to seize Gaza. Remarks by JD Vance and Pete Hegseth at a security conference in Germany raised concerns that the U.S. might align with Russia and move away from Europe. Germany believes that to prevent another Hitler, the government must exclude parties that are considered extreme. Vance and Elon Musk have challenged this approach. Hegseth made his overseas debut this past week. It was a bruising 72-hour crash course in geopolitical realities, Eric Schmitt and John Ismay write. More on the Trump Administration President Trump, on social media, posted a quotation that appears to encapsulate his current attitude: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he wrote. Mayor Eric Adams of New York plans to sue the Trump administration over its seizure of federal funding meant to cover the cost of housing migrants. Trump’s proposal to reduce medical research grants would hit colleges and hospitals in every state. See how. International At the Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj, India. Atul Loke for The New York Times At the world’s largest religious gathering, in Prayagraj, India, a lost-and-found center attends to the faithful’s earthly needs. Hamas freed three Israeli hostages and Israel released 369 Palestinian prisoners, the sixth exchange of the cease-fire deal. Other Big Stories Utah’s governor signed a law that bans collective bargaining for teachers, police officers and other public employees. Big liberal donors, frustrated with Democrats and fearful of Trump’s retribution, are pulling back. A winter storm is spreading across America’s East Coast, bringing high winds and snow. TRUMP’S ACTIONS It can be hard to keep up with the deluge of news from the White House. The Times has created a page to track the Trump administration — including its major executive orders, memos, lawsuits and social media posts. Here are some from the past week: Sunday: Trump ordered the Treasury secretary to stop producing new pennies (though it’s not clear the president has that power). Monday: The White House shielded Musk’s government-slashing DOGE program from having to comply with public-records requests. Tuesday: Trump fired the inspector general for U.S.A.I.D., whose office had just warned that staffing cuts at the agency could lead to the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Wednesday: The attorney general sued New York over its immigration policies, citing a law that permits noncitizens to get driver’s licenses. See the full list here. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Was Trump’s call to Vladimir Putin to negotiate a cease-fire in Ukraine appeasement? Yes. Similarly to how Britain gave Czechoslovakia’s territory to Germany without Czech participation in negotiations, Trump’s phone call with Putin made Ukraine an afterthought. “The U.S. president wants to get credit for a peace deal even if it kills Ukraine,” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin writes. No. A peace deal would allow Ukrainians to rebuild, and Trump and the Americans are offering Russia a draw, not a victory. “A cease-fire does not require, as the Russians expect, that it abandon hopes of recovering its lost territory forever,” Lawrence Freedman writes for The Financial Times. FROM OPINION Trump has room to negotiate with China on trade and nuclear weapons, but he shouldn’t concede anything on Taiwan, Bonnie Glaser writes. The 14th Amendment was not intended to give birthright citizenship to children born to illegal migrants, Randy Barnett and Ilan Wurman argue. Here’s a column by Nicholas Kristof on Trumpism. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS A screenshot from the game Stimulation Clicker. Neal Agarwal Stimulation Clicker: This game turns internet brain rot into a joyous pastime. Parties: For these 20-somethings, Trump is “making it sexy” to be Republican. Vows: She was the female lead in his film. Now she’s his leading lady. Lives Lived: Nelson Johnson, a labor activist in North Carolina, was injured in a 1979 shooting by white supremacists in Greensboro that killed five protesters. He later formed a commission to help his community process the tragedy. He died at 81. BOOK OF THE WEEK By Elisabeth Egan “Stone Yard Devotional” by Charlotte Wood: You know the impulse to walk away from it all and go hibernate somewhere peaceful? That’s what Charlotte Woods’s narrator does in “Stone Yard Devotional,” her Booker-shortlisted novel about an atheist who seeks refuge at a convent in New South Wales. This meditative (but by no means uneventful) account includes a mouse infestation, a celebrity nun, a pair of complicated homecomings and countless reminders that the sacred and the profane not only coexist but complement one another. As our reviewer put it, “Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel, no one of these paths is holier than another.” Does our narrator find what she’s looking for? The answer to this question turns out to be less important than how she contributes to her community. (Read our review of “Stone Yard Devotional.”) More on books To find your next romance novel — and to find out what the experts are enjoying now — start here. THE INTERVIEW Philip Montgomery for The New York Times By Lulu Garcia-Navarro This week’s subject for The Interview is Arizona’s junior senator, Ruben Gallego, whose win over Kari Lake was one of the few bright spots for Democrats in November. Gallego had plenty to say about where Democrats went wrong and how they can win over Trump voters while also standing up to Trump. I want to talk through some demographic groups that Democrats really need to win back if they want to be competitive. Everybody? Men, for example. Yep. You’ve been described to me as a bro. And not in a bad way. [Laughs.] You won Latino men by 30 points in an election in which Trump dominated that group. I know men are a very broad group, but what do you think Democrats have misunderstood about them? That we could be working to make the status of men better without diminishing the status of women. A lot of times we forget that we still need men to vote for us. That’s how we still win elections. But we don’t really talk about making the lives of men better, working to make sure that they have wages so they can support their families. I also think some of this is purely psychological — like we just can’t put our finger on it. During my campaign, I noticed when I was talking to men, especially Latino men, about the feeling of pride, bringing money home, being able to support your family, the feeling of bringing security — they wanted to hear that someone understood that need. And a lot of times we are so afraid of communicating that to men because we think somehow we’re going to also diminish the status of women. That’s going to end up being a problem. Read more of the interview here. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Make sweet treats at home. Revamp your bedroom on a budget. Shop Presidents’ Day sales. MEAL PLAN Shrimp scampi with orzo. Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini. In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Mia Leimkuhler suggests easy and quick pasta recipes for when you’re running on fumes, including ones for shrimp scampi with orzo, tobiko pasta and rice noodles with spicy pork. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was jailbird. Can you put eight historical events — including the Freedom Riders’ campaign, the Chernobyl disaster, and the invention of Post-it Notes — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. And we recommend the new Sports Edition of Connections. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 18, 2025 Author Members Posted February 18, 2025 February 17, 2025 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering a major policy challenge for Democrats — plus taxpayer records, Eric Adams and dangerous storms. President Trump. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Moving fast President Trump has spent the first few weeks of his second term bulldozing through the federal bureaucracy. He says that the government and its rules are inefficient and, during his first term, got in the way of executing his agenda. Democrats may not approve of Trump’s targets — foreign aid and consumer protection agencies — or the potential constitutional crisis he initiated when he tried to eliminate them. But some Democrats might envy the speed at which he cut through red tape. After all, liberal lawmakers have for years complained about bureaucracy that moved too slowly and rules that stifled their ambitions. One such Democrat was Joe Biden. Toward the end of his term as president, he said his administration was too slow to roll out his infrastructure law. “Historians will talk about (how) great the impact was,” Biden told USA Today last month. “But it didn’t have any immediate impact on people’s lives.” Similarly, Barack Obama promised “shovel-ready” projects to help revitalize the economy, but they were slow to get started. “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” Obama said in 2011. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has criticized his state’s troubled high-speed rail project. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades,” he said in 2023. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things.” Democrats typically run for office promising to make government help people. But Democrats have also enacted rules to improve workplaces, stop unfair business practices and protect the environment. Even when those rules work well, they impose additional requirements on new public and private projects. Today’s newsletter explains why some Democrats were starting to rethink their approach even before Trump took office. Getting permits Building new things in America can be very hard. Consider clean-energy projects. These are meant to create jobs — in solar, wind, nuclear and so on — and combat climate change. But passing a law that spends money on such projects is only the first step. The companies and agencies involved have to apply for permits and show they meet regulatory standards to start construction. The government takes time to assess those applications. The process can last months or years before building begins. More than two years after Congress enacted $5 billion to electric vehicle charging stations, just two states — Ohio and New York — had opened any. After three years, the number of stations nationwide numbered in the mere dozens, out of thousands the program could eventually build. An E.V. charging station in London, Ohio. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times Sometimes, other problems get in the way. One project, known as the Grain Belt Express, would build electricity lines to connect turbines in windy Kansas to not-so-windy Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. Developers proposed the project in 2010. Fifteen years later, construction has not started. Why? Every jurisdiction in the path of the electrical lines needs to sign off. At one point or another, at least one agency has opposed the project. Legal challenges have also blocked or delayed hundreds more clean-energy projects, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Activists often use environmental laws to try to stop projects that they oppose, such as offshore wind turbines along the East Coast. (Yes, there is a certain irony in using environmental laws to block action on climate change.) In some cases, opponents have real concerns. They might worry that giant power lines will ruin vistas that drive tourism or that a solar farm will damage local ecosystems. The question is if those drawbacks, however legitimate, outweigh the benefits — and how to balance competing goals. The balancing act goes beyond clean energy. Environmental protections can stop water and air pollution, but they can also create new hurdles for road and rail projects. Labor rules can make workplaces safer and fairer, but they can also make it too expensive to open a factory for semiconductor chips. Zoning laws can help preserve the feel and look of a neighborhood, but they can also make it difficult to build housing. Building trust These issues can seem wonky and technical. The phrase “permitting reform” is not the sort of slogan that drives voters en masse to the polls. But it matters for Biden and other Democrats’ legacies. When Biden took office in 2021, he promised to show that the government can help everyday Americans. “We have to prove democracy still works,” Biden said in his first address to Congress. “That our government still works — and we can deliver for our people.” The leisurely pace of change means Americans may never see much of Biden’s proof. The Trump administration is trying to unilaterally take back some of Biden’s infrastructure and clean-energy spending. The Republican-controlled Congress has vowed to repeal much of it, too. If the Biden administration had already doled out the money, Trump and Congress could not easily claw it back. But because much of it was never spent, Republicans can stop projects before they even begin. Related: Progressive lawmakers have erected barriers to their own policies, Marc Dunkelman writes in The Atlantic. His new book, “Why Nothing Works,” proposes solutions. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to give a team member working with Elon Musk access to sensitive taxpayer data. The first test of Trump’s power to fire officials has reached the Supreme Court. Lawyers for Trump asked the justices to let him fire a government lawyer who leads a watchdog agency. Trump fired some nuclear security workers. Then he asked them to come back. Trump is targeting people he perceives as disloyal. It’s a campaign of retribution that has little analogue in history, Luke Broadwater writes. American consumers are concerned about inflation. Trump’s plans for reciprocal tariffs on U.S. trading partners could mean higher costs. The Trump administration has renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, but most of the body of water lies outside U.S. control. See a map. Eric Adams Eric Adams Dave Sanders for The New York Times Federal prosecutors were divided after Trump’s team asked lawyers to dismiss corruption charges against Eric Adams. Read the inside story of their debate. Adams resisted calls to resign: “I am going nowhere,” he said. War in Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine would not accept a peace deal it did not help negotiate. Read a guide to how the war could end. Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, offered British troops to help guarantee Ukraine’s security in any peace deal. More International News Vice President JD Vance Matthias Schrader/Associated Press After a European tour by Trump officials, one thing was clear to leaders on the continent: It is getting harder to depend on the U.S., David Sanger and Steven Erlanger write. An Israeli military operation in the West Bank has displaced roughly 40,000 Palestinians from their homes. Experts say it is the biggest displacement of civilians in the territory since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. ISIS is still holding hundreds of women and girls captive. A network of amateur sleuths is trying to find them. Other Big Stories In Kentucky. Jared Hamilton for The New York Times Storms and flooding have devastated Kentucky, causing at least nine deaths and widespread damage. Strong winds have upended travel plans on the East Coast. In the U.S., three companies control the manufacturing of most of the country’s fire trucks, leading to rising costs and delayed orders. Porsche is no longer a premium sports car in China. It has serious competition from local rivals. Opinions When children have to endure pain at the hospital, adults tell them it won’t hurt. But deception doesn’t protect children — it leaves them ill-prepared, Allison Sweet Grant writes. Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Trump’s first month. Here are columns by David French on the war in Ukraine and M. Gessen on Trump’s bad ideas. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS The Hamburg Hawks’ meat raffle. Malik Rainey for The New York Times Like bingo, but with beef: For Midwestern communities, meat raffles are a fund-raising tool. Most clicked yesterday: See S.N.L.’s greatest parodies of commercials. Ask Vanessa: “Why don’t people dress up to go out anymore?” Recovery: An effective treatment for opioid addiction exists. It is underprescribed. Shop smarter: See the best Presidents’ Day sales. Well: What is your outfit telling your therapist? Metropolitan Diary: Bonus pickles. Lives Lived: Yrjo Kukkapuro was a Finnish modernist furniture designer who devoted his creative energies to sedentary comfort, creating dozens of chairs that coddled sitters and lent flair to their surroundings. He died at 91. SPORTS N.B.A. N.B.A.: Steph Curry hit a half-court shot in the first-ever All-Star tournament. Dallas Mavericks: Police arrested assistant coach Darrell Armstrong on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. N.F.L.: Seven more massage therapists accused Ravens kicker Justin Tucker of sexually inappropriate behavior, which brings the total number of accusers to 16. Women’s college basketball: UConn beat South Carolina on the road to snap the Gamecocks’ 71-game home winning streak. ARTS AND IDEAS In vintage furs. Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times At the Manhattan Vintage show this month, sellers filled racks with fox, mink and Mongolian furs. For years, wearing fur was considered taboo but the tide is turning — especially if the wearer asserts that the piece is “vintage.” Read about what happened to the stigma of wearing fur. More on culture The Season 3 premiere of “The White Lotus.” HBO The third season of “The White Lotus” premiered on HBO, introducing a new cast of wealthy tourists and resort employees in Thailand. “This American Life” examines stories of Black people navigating the backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion. Listen here. Despite poor reviews, Marvel’s “Captain America: Brave New World” was No. 1 at the global box office over the weekend. McNally Editions has reissued “The Pilgrimage,” a 1961 novel about a devoutly Catholic gay man and his wife that was banned in Ireland upon its initial publication. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Simpson for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne. Braise honey-soy pork in the slow cooker with lime and ginger. Create art with a drawing tablet. Avoid night sweats. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was weaving. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —German Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter misspelled a former “Saturday Night Live” star’s name. He is Andy Samberg, not Sandberg. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 18, 2025 Author Members Posted February 18, 2025 February 18, 2025 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering Trump’s tariffs — as well as resignations, a plane crash and a book on ugliness. President Trump Al Drago for The New York Times Dueling predictions With many of President Trump’s policies, he and his critics agree about the likely effects even if they sharply disagree about the wisdom of those effects. Consider this list of predictions: Elon Musk’s efforts to cut government spending will weaken the federal government. Trump’s overhaul of the Justice Department will make it more loyal to him and his allies. His immigration policies will reduce the number of people coming to the United States. His Europe policies will cause the continent to be less reliant on the U.S. His assault on D.E.I. will shrink diversity programs in both the government and the private sector. Tariffs, however, are an exception. Trump and his critics don’t disagree only about whether they are a good idea; the two sides also have diametrically opposed predictions about what will happen if Trump implements even some of the tariffs he has promised. His critics — including some Republicans — believe that imposing fees on imports will damage the U.S. economy. They say the possibility has already created uncertainty that is anathema to business investment. When more tariffs are in effect, they will raise prices for consumers and hurt more American manufacturers than they help. (Think of an automaker that will have to pay more for the raw materials and parts it buys from overseas.) Some people who are alarmed by Trump even tell me that they’re quietly rooting for him to go big on tariffs because they think it will damage his presidency. Trump’s advisers have a very different prediction. They believe the concerns about uncertainty are overblown. They think the mere threat of tariffs will cause other countries to reduce their own barriers to U.S. companies. (Already, European Union officials have signaled they will cut tariffs on American cars to appease Trump.) And Trump’s team says that tariffs will have more benefits than downsides. Navarro’s case Peter Navarro Eric Lee/The New York Times If you’re hoping to understand the Trump argument, I recommend today’s episode of “The Daily,” in which my colleague Ana Swanson interviews Peter Navarro, a senior White House adviser whose writings have influenced Trump’s views. Navarro first warned about the economic threat from China years ago, when many mainstream Democrats and Republicans still argued that China’s rise would benefit the U.S. Today, those mainstream figures agree China as a worrisome rival — even if they think Navarro is wrong about the correct policy solution. In Navarro’s conversation on “The Daily,” he says that the strong economic performance and the low inflation during Trump’s first term — when he imposed tariffs on China — show that tariffs don’t have the downsides many economists forecast. “It’s not going to be painful for America,” Navarro said. “President Donald John Trump has proven that tariffs work for the American people, and they’re going to be even more — much more — important this second term.” Specifically, Navarro argues that the U.S. is such an important market that foreign companies will cut their prices and accept lower profits rather than pass along the cost of tariffs to consumers. He also predicts that suppliers, such as those that sell parts to automakers, will relocate to the U.S. It’s still possible that Trump will not follow through on many of his tariff threats. He delayed planned tariffs on Canada and Mexico after the stock market reacted poorly. And The Wall Street Journal reported last night that Republican senators skeptical of tariffs were maneuvering to reduce Navarro’s influence in the White House. They hope Trump’s other economic advisers, some of whom are awaiting confirmation, will help their cause. But at least some major tariffs seem likely to go into effect, as Ana has reported. Last week, Trump announced that 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum would begin March 12. He also directed his aides to design reciprocal tariffs, which would place the same fees on a country’s exports to the U.S. that it places on imports from the U.S. It sets up a fascinating real-world experiment in which two sides of a debate have very different expectations about what will happen. You can listen to “The Daily” here. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration Elon Musk Eric Lee/The New York Times The top official at the Social Security Administration stepped down after members of Elon Musk’s DOGE sought access to sensitive personal data about millions of Americans. Republicans set a limit for their planned tax cuts, $4.5 trillion over 10 years, that would require the cuts to be far smaller than those Trump campaigned on. Trump nominated Ed Martin, an election denier who was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, to be U.S. attorney for Washington. The Education Department warned schools that they risk losing federal funding if they account for race in hiring, scholarships and “all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.” Thousands protested across the U.S. on Presidents’ Day. They criticized Trump’s actions against federal workers and prosecutors. Russia-Ukraine War Delegations from the U.S. and Russia traveled to Saudi Arabia to begin negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Ukraine and Europe are not participating in the talks. Russia released a 28-year-old American it had detained on marijuana charges. Russian officials called his release a good-will gesture. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, summoned European leaders to Paris to devise their own strategy for Ukraine. Eric Adams Eric Adams Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times Four New York City officials plan to resign over Mayor Eric Adams’s cooperation with Trump. A prosecutor accused Adams of embracing Trump’s immigration policies in exchange for an end to the mayor’s legal troubles. Gov. Kathy Hochul is considering removing Adams from office. She was to hold a meeting today to discuss the possibility. International The C.I.A. is conducting secret drone flights over Mexico to locate fentanyl labs. The Biden administration began the program and the Trump administration is expanding it. Costa Rica will accept a U.S. flight carrying 200 migrants. It is the second Central American nation to receive deportees from distant countries who entered the U.S. illegally. Israel will keep its forces in five locations in southern Lebanon beyond the deadline for a full withdrawal. Officials said Hezbollah still posed a threat to Israelis living near the border. There is a global shortage of medical oxygen. Hundreds of millions of patients require it every year, but less than a third of them actually get it, a study found. Trump’s cuts to U.S.A.I.D. have halted a program that supports victims of Agent Orange, the toxic chemical that the U.S. used during the Vietnam War. Read one woman’s story. Mexico is threatening to sue Google over the “Gulf of America” name change. It says Google relabeled the entire gulf, including Mexican and Cuban maritime areas, but that Trump’s order applies only to the U.S. continental shelf, The Washington Post reports. Pope Francis, 88, is hospitalized with a respiratory infection. Other Big Stories Irene Mekel, 82, has Alzheimer’s disease. Melissa Schriek for The New York Times A Dutch woman with Alzheimer’s wants a doctor to end her life when the disease becomes advanced. Doctors say they won’t. Meet America’s new gun owners: More women and people of color are buying firearms. A Delta plane carrying 80 people from Minneapolis to Toronto overturned while landing. At least 18 people were hurt, though none died. Southwest Airlines announced layoffs in a plan to cut about 15 percent of its corporate work force. Opinions China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is pursuing trade policies that are harming global commerce, Brad Setser argues. War is an ecological catastrophe. Disarmament is as much about saving our planet as it is about making peace, Sunil Amrith writes. Here are columns by Lydia Polgreen on South Africa and Thomas Edsall on Trump and Musk’s spending cuts. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS In Manhattan. Oliver Farshi for The New York Times Squawk: How three parrots tore apart a friendship and a Manhattan co-op. Runaway dog: He’s become a hero in New Orleans. His saga has inspired tattoos, murals and Mardi Gras floats. “MAGA Youth”: Young people say it’s becoming cooler to be conservative. Relationships: “I opened my marriage. Maybe I should have tried an affair instead,” a woman writes for The Cut. Skip the beach: Go to a city that is good for adults and kids for spring break. Most clicked yesterday: “Why don’t people dress up to go out anymore?” Lives Lived: Ron Travisano was an adman who helped create the Meow Mix jingle, the Joe Isuzu pitchman and many other memorable commercials. He has died at 86. SPORTS Hockey: The United States lost to Sweden, 2-1. The U.S. will still face Canada in the championship game Thursday. Tennis: Stefano Vukov, the coach of women’s tennis star Elena Rybakina, is accused of mentally abusing Rybakina, according to a W.T.A. report — even as the player insists he is blameless. College football: The commissioners of the Big Ten and SEC are meeting this week to determine the future of the College Football Playoff. ARTS AND IDEAS Moshtari Hilal, author of “Ugliness.” Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times How do we decide that someone is “ugly”? And what if you believe that the ugly someone is you? A new book by Moshtari Hilal, an Afghan German writer and artist, explores these questions by combining personal memoir with history, sociology and philosophy. Read more about it here. More on culture In Newburgh, N.Y. Gabriel Zimmer/Catskill Image A Philip Johnson house is on the market in Newburgh, N.Y. In London, audiences are fainting during a play’s abortion scene. “America is in shock that the guy whose catchphrase was ‘You’re fired’ is firing everybody in government,” Bill Maher said of Trump. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Mark Weinberg for The New York Times Add a dollop of mayonnaise to this spicy turkey burger. Consider a shampoo bar. Pick the best bath bomb. Sleep better. Try a silk pillowcase, a nicer bedside lamp and a warm robe. Declutter your fridge. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was arachnid. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 20, 2025 Author Members Posted February 20, 2025 February 19, 2025 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering the latest on the war in Ukraine — as well as Trump, Israeli hostages and an asteroid. Ukrainian troops in the Donbas region. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Ukraine’s equation For Ukraine, a peace deal with Russia is not just about stopping the war. A deal should also prevent the next one — by convincing Russia that its invasion was a costly failure. In that context, the past week brought a lot of bad news for Ukraine. American officials conceded that Ukraine would not reclaim all of its territory or join NATO. They also said that U.S. troops would not help protect Ukraine’s borders after the war. Maybe a truce would have eventually included those conditions. But by granting them now, the concessions push a peace deal in Russia’s favor — and may get Vladimir Putin to think that, after all of this, the war was worth the costs. “The United States is intent on ending this war,” said my colleague Julian Barnes, who covers international security. “And ending it quickly likely means trying to end it on Russia’s terms.” Today’s newsletter looks at why Ukraine is increasingly concerned about a future Russian invasion. Imposing costs Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has worried that an eventual cease-fire will simply give Russia time to rebuild and come back. So Ukraine and its allies have tried to prevent this scenario through two approaches. First, they have tried to make the war as costly as possible for Russia. On the diplomatic front, Ukraine’s allies have imposed economic sanctions on Russia. On the battlefield, Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers to death and injuries. At the same time, Ukraine has tried to retake as much territory as possible. If Russia ended the war with an economy in ruins, a colossal death toll and little new territory, it would likely look at the invasion as a mistake. Sources: The Institute for the Study of War | Map is as of Feb. 18. | By The New York Times Second, Ukraine and its allies have fortified their alliances. The United States and Europe have shown their commitment to Ukraine by sending hundreds of billions of dollars in aid. Ukraine moved to join the European Union, and it wants to join NATO. A solitary Ukraine can’t fight off Russia, but a united West can. But these approaches haven’t worked as hoped. Russia’s economy has held up surprisingly well (with China’s help). And while Putin’s armies did not manage to take Kyiv or topple the country’s government, Russia still holds about 20 percent of Ukraine, including the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimea regions. The U.S.-Ukraine alliance is also falling apart. President Trump’s unsolicited concessions show that America is not willing to fight as hard for Ukraine as it once was. Meanwhile, Trump has demanded that Ukraine give up its natural resources in exchange for U.S. aid and security guarantees. And he has made hostile comments about Ukraine. Yesterday, he falsely blamed it for the war. “You should have never started it,” Trump said. For Putin, these are all signs that Ukraine’s biggest supporter won’t be there for a second round of war. Absent America Without the United States, Ukraine would have to rely on European support to stand against Russia. In theory, Europe is big enough to keep Ukraine afloat in the current war. “If Europe were to get together and focus on providing artillery rounds, air defense ammunition and support for Ukraine’s domestic drones, that would allow Ukraine to hold their lines,” Julian said. But Europe is divided, as my colleague Mark Landler reported. Consider European leaders’ recent talks about deploying soldiers in Ukraine after the war: France supported the idea. Britain conditioned its deployment on American backup. Poland said it needed to keep its forces at home to defend its own borders from Russia. Germany said these discussions were premature. None of this inspires much confidence for Ukraine. The West has fractured and Putin knows it. More coverage American and Russian leaders met in Saudi Arabia, where they discussed resetting their countries’ diplomatic and business relationships. Steve Witkoff, a member of the U.S. delegation, called the meeting “positive, upbeat, constructive.” Trump’s pivot toward Russia is upending generations of U.S. foreign policy, Peter Baker writes. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, lashed out at the Trump administration for leaving him out of the talks. “Decisions on how to end the war in Ukraine cannot be made without Ukraine,” he said. Right-wing media figures are celebrating America’s negotiations with Russia. THE LATEST NEWS Trump’s Government Overhaul Trump signed an executive order that seeks more power over regulatory agencies that Congress made independent from direct White House control. The director of the F.D.A.’s food division resigned, saying that recent layoffs made it harder to protect the nation’s food supply. A federal judge in Washington allowed Elon Musk’s government-slashing DOGE team to access data at several federal agencies, for now, but left open the possibility of a future ban. Musk’s team claimed it saved $8 billion in one contract. It was actually $8 million. A White House official told the judge that Musk is not the head of the DOGE effort. But it’s not clear who, other than Musk, is in charge. Members of the Kennedy family said cuts by DOGE forced the temporary closure of John F. Kennedy’s presidential library. The administration has laid off at least 3,000 employees across the Forest Service and the National Parks. Losing those workers — who patrol rivers, clean trails and study forests — could make the parks more dangerous, employees say. More on the Trump Administration Migrants at a hotel in Panama. Federico Rios Escobar for The New York Times The Trump administration is deporting hundreds of migrants, including people from Afghanistan and China, to Panama, where they are locked in a hotel. Trump is now chairman of the Kennedy Center, an institution central to Washington’s cultural life. One thing to expect: More country music. Chris Wright, the energy secretary, called Britain’s net-zero emissions goal “sinister” and wrongly blamed renewable energy for Britain’s economic struggles. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is facing pressure to remove Mayor Eric Adams from office, but she is proceeding cautiously. Hochul threatened to deploy the National Guard after corrections officers at more than half of New York State’s prisons went on strike. The officers are protesting staff shortages. More on Politics The Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that bans gender-transition treatments for minors. Mormon voters in Utah still dislike Trump. Leonard Peltier, a Native American rights activist convicted of killing two F.B.I. agents in 1975, was released from prison. Before leaving office, President Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s life sentence to home confinement. More International News Jair Bolsonaro last month. Victor Moriyama for The New York Times Brazil’s attorney general charged former president Jair Bolsonaro with trying to overturn the 2022 election. The case will go before the nation’s Supreme Court. Pope Francis, 88, has pneumonia in both lungs. He has been in a Rome hospital since Friday. Hamas also said it would release the remains of four Israeli hostages tomorrow, including a mother and her two red-haired children who became famous in Israel, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group fighting in Sudan’s civil war, announced plans to form its own government. Nepal accepted a $500 million U.S. grant for infrastructure projects, but the Trump administration’s foreign aid freeze has put the project in doubt. It provides an opening for China to step in. Rwanda appears peaceful, but it’s fueling a war in neighboring Congo, where thousands have died in fighting. Other Big Stories An asteroid. NASA/Magdalena Ridge 2.4M Telescope, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Astronomers say an asteroid has a 3.1 percent chance of hitting Earth in 2032. That’s the highest chance ever recorded for a space rock. Arctic air from Canada has descended on the Central and Eastern U.S., delivering record-breaking cold. A Florida man charged with attempted murder in the shooting of two Israeli tourists said he thought they were Palestinian. Two backcountry skiers died in an avalanche in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains near Bend. Anne Marie Hochhalter, paralyzed in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, has died at 43. Opinions The international community should impose sanctions on Rwanda for its support of armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as it did in 2012, Denis Mukwege writes. Bret Stephens criticizes Vice President JD Vance for meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Thomas Friedman argues that Trump’s tariff strategy is dangerous because it is unclear what the president hopes to achieve. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS A black seadevil anglerfish. Condrik Research and Preserve NGO, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Big mouth, big feelings: An eerie deep-sea fish spent its final hours swimming near the surface. Its journey has turned the fish into an unlikely folk hero. The Great Read of the day: She became the America’s leading art consultant and drew her clients close. Then she stole millions from them. Letter of Recommendation: Euston Road is London’s most despised thoroughfare. Consider a visit. Ask Well: “Do women need more sleep than men?” Lives Lived: Dickson Despommier was a microbiologist who proposed that cities should grow food in high-rises, popularizing the term “vertical farming” — an idea that became a reality around the globe. He has died at 84. SPORTS M.L.B.: The Blue Jays and young star Vladimir Guerrero Jr. were unable to agree on a contract extension before the season begins. New York Mets: Juan Soto told reporters yesterday his new team gives him “the best chance to win,” which miffed his former Yankees teammate Aaron Judge. N.F.L.: The Athletic released its list of the top 50 coaches, agents and media members under age 40 this morning. See the names. ARTS AND IDEAS From left, Muni Long, Kehlani and H.E.R. D’Angelo Lovell Williams for The New York Times A new generation of female artists is reinventing R&B. Some are reviving the genre’s gospel roots; others are imbuing the form with hip-hop and global influences. All are looking backward without getting stuck in the past. Read interviews with some of the artists, and listen to nine songs that define R&B’s new era. More on culture The rapper ASAP Rocky was found not guilty of assault with a deadly weapon. Jonathan Bailey is on a hot streak after “Wicked” and “Bridgerton.” In Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” he takes on his biggest stage role to date. Read our review. Nike announced a partnership with Skims, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear company. Stephen Colbert joked about Eric Adams. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Linda Xiao for The New York Times Make a flavorful, easy chicken and chickpea tray bake. Visit the “White Lotus” star Natasha Rothwell’s five favorite spots in London. Surf the internet with a free VPN. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was epiphany. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —German Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 21, 2025 Author Members Posted February 21, 2025 February 20, 2025 Good morning. Today, my colleague Patricia Cohen discusses the sanctions against Russia. We’re also covering Trump and Zelensky, Israeli hostages and the dollar. —David Leonhardt Exchange rates in Moscow. Pavel Bednyakov/Associated Press Russia’s pain point By Patricia Cohen I cover the global economy. President Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine quickly. This week, he falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war and made important concessions to Russia. His advisers also met with counterparts from Moscow to revive the two countries’ relationship. One consistent demand from Russia is that the United States and other countries lift sanctions — a device that Trump already said he wants to use “as little as possible.” Washington led an international campaign for tough economic penalties after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Dozens of countries have punished Russian banks, businesses and oligarchs. They froze $300 billion of Russia’s assets, barred it from much of the global financial system and restricted what it could buy and sell. How effective were those sanctions? Russia’s economy is stagnating, and inflation has spiraled. Many products and parts are unavailable. More than a thousand foreign companies have limited their operations in Russia. Yet the war has persisted. Now, Russia is pitching itself as a place where American companies can make money. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain the debate about sanctions — and what Trump might do with them. What worked Freight cars in Omsk, Russia. Alexey Malgavko/Reuters Economic sanctions have become a common foreign policy tool in recent years. And no country uses them more frequently than the United States. That’s not surprising. Once you rule out combat, there aren’t many options left. Sometimes they work well. Sanctions got Libya to turn over the suspects in the 1988 bombing of a jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, and to abandon nuclear and chemical weapons in the early 2000s. But disappointment is more common. Decades of U.S. sanctions against Cuba did nothing to shorten Fidel Castro’s reign. Nor did Trump end Iran’s nuclear program (or its leaders’ grip on power) when he withdrew from a nuclear deal with Iran and reimposed sanctions in 2018. What counts as success? Some policymakers predicted soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that sanctions might force Vladimir Putin to end the war or cause the Russian economy to collapse. Neither prophecy came true. Putin found several ways — including an alliance with China — to blunt their impact. Still, sanctions have hurt Russia and hampered its war effort. They have reduced revenue from exports and made all foreign transactions more complicated and expensive, said Laura Solanko, who tracks the Russian economy for the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition. Now, Russia spends roughly 40 percent of its budget on the war. Food prices and inflation have soared. Interest rates have reached 21 percent. Labor shortages are rampant. Growth is slowing. The long-term economic outlook has darkened. As Timothy Ash, a fellow at Chatham House, a London think tank, described sanctions: “They’ve done more than anyone had imagined, but they haven’t had as much impact as perhaps people had hoped.” What might Trump do President Trump Al Drago for The New York Times Everyone is weary of war. Ukraine has been losing on the battlefield, and its thinning ranks are exhausted. Enthusiasm to arm Ukraine has dampened in Europe and the United States. And even though Russia has gained ground, its casualties are high and it struggles to recruit soldiers. Trump could offer to lift sanctions to entice Putin to agree to a deal. But he has less leverage if he acts alone. Russia’s frozen assets are held by several countries. Two-thirds are in Europe, and several leaders say the money should pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction. The European Union, previously Russia’s largest trading partner, could also keep its ban on most trade and fuel sales. Even so, the United States wields unique power in the global financial system. Much of the world’s trade — no matter where it’s conducted — is settled using U.S. dollars. And American banks are the only ones that can handle those transactions. That means the United States could significantly ease Russian companies’ ability to do business abroad by allowing them to use dollars. Trump suggested this week that Russia could keep territory it captured, and he said Ukraine should not join NATO — two key Russian demands. Its biggest remaining one is about sanctions. Trump could use it to sweeten Russia’s deal, though if recent days are any guide, he may drop them anyway. More Ukraine coverage Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He has falsely cast Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator without elections.” Zelensky said that Trump was in a “web of disinformation.” Many Republicans in Congress spent their careers arguing for a hawkish stance against Moscow. Now, as Trump turns toward Russia, they’re silent. Emmanuel Macron called a second meeting of European leaders in Paris to discuss Ukraine’s future. Western brands and direct flights: As Moscow and Washington move to reset their relationship, Russians hope for a return to normalcy. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration Congestion pricing scanners in midtown Manhattan. Karsten Moran for The New York Times The Trump administration told New York to end its congestion pricing program, which charges drivers who enter parts of Manhattan. The governor said she would challenge Trump’s order. Trump, in a social media post announcing the congestion pricing decision, wrote about himself: “LONG LIVE THE KING!” The I.R.S. will start laying off more than 6,000 employees today. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered officials to cut 8 percent from the defense budget over each of the next five years. Boeing is years behind schedule on delivering two new Air Force One jets, which Trump ordered in his first term. Trump has asked Elon Musk to help speed things up. More on Politics “Time for him to go”: Mayor Eric Adams is losing support among New Yorkers. Civil rights groups sued the Trump administration over cuts to diversity programs. The groups said Trump’s orders discriminated against Black and transgender people. Democratic lawmakers called for an investigation into what they said was a pattern of interference with U.S. prosecutors’ decisions by the Trump administration. Aviation Lawmakers and labor unions called on Trump to stop layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration, which they said posed safety risks at a fraught moment for air travel. Two people died after two small planes collided near an Arizona airport. Delta Air Lines is offering $30,000 to each passenger on a flight that flipped upside down on landing in Toronto. Israel-Hamas War Palestinian militants returning remains of hostages. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times Hamas returned the bodies of four Israelis abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel — including a woman and her two young children — in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Israeli officials have yet to confirm the cause of death. Hamas has said they were killed in Israeli airstrikes. To many Israelis, the abduction of the mother and her children epitomized the viciousness of the assault. Arab leaders are working on a plan in which they would help fund and oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. Unlike Trump, they want to keep Gaza’s residents in place and preserve the possibility of a Palestinian state. Business Microsoft’s new quantum computing chip. Grant Hindsley for The New York Times Scientists at Microsoft say they have developed a new state of matter — not solid, liquid or gas — that could power the next generation of computers, known as quantum computers. KFC is moving its corporate headquarters out of Kentucky. The company will relocate to Plano, Texas, where its sister company Pizza Hut is based. Apple has unveiled a lower-priced iPhone with A.I. features. Previously, only the more expensive models had the features. Other Big Stories Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Loren Elliott for The New York Times A landslide in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., is speeding up. Trump’s media company sued a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, accusing him of censoring right-wing voices on social media. Hours earlier, the judge had begun weighing whether to arrest Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president and a Trump ally. Pakistan is hosting a top cricket championship. India has refused to attend. A Mississippi judge ordered a Clarksdale newspaper to remove an editorial critical of city officials from its website. Opinions The far right is rising in the land of “never again,” Jan Böhmermann, a German satirist, argues in a video. Watch it here. Bird flu is no longer confined to birds, it is also in cows. Public officials should help dairy farmers stop the spread, Maryn McKenna writes. Here’s a column by Nicholas Kristof on U.S.-European relations. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS A former bank in Elkhart, Kan. Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times Cryptocurrency: How a scam turned a small town against itself. The S.S. United States: The largest passenger ship ever built in America has started its final voyage. Sunny side up: How safe are runny yolks? It depends how much risk you’re willing to accept. Most clicked yesterday: A deep-sea anglerfish that has become an internet hero. Social Q’s: “I found pornography on my husband’s computer. I’m furious!” Lives Lived: Gerd Stern was a Beat Generation poet and pioneering multimedia artist who helped define the 1960s with psychedelic, sensory-overloading installations and performances. He died at 96. SPORTS Hockey: Canada and the United States will compete for the first 4 Nations championship title tonight. M.L.B.: A spring training game today will feature robot umpires for the first time at the major-league level. Women’s tennis: The 44-year-old Venus Williams will play as a wild-card entry at the BNP Paribas Open next month at Indian Wells, her first tournament in nearly a year. ARTS AND IDEAS Yannik Saal The U.S. dollar has been on the rise since autumn. It’s now stronger than the euro, the Japanese yen and the Canadian dollar. For American travelers, the exchange rate bonus means bargains abroad. Our Frugal Traveler columnist explains where American travelers can take advantage. More on culture Jack Quaid Hannah Edelman for The New York Times Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, wanted to prove himself. Over the past several years, he’s done just that. Blake Lively claimed in an updated lawsuit against Justin Baldoni that two other actresses felt “uncomfortable” on the set of “It Ends With Us” because of his behavior. Stephen Colbert joked about Musk. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Armando Rafael for The New York Times Roast miso-maple chicken on a sheet pan with brussels sprouts. Test your knowledge of book titles. Hang a caddy on your bed frame. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were cloaked, deadlock and deadlocked. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 23, 2025 Author Members Posted February 23, 2025 February 21, 2025 Good morning. Today, my colleague Jeffrey Gettleman writes about the costs of cutting U.S.A.I.D. We’re also covering Marco Rubio, deportations and hockey. —David Leonhardt At a camp for internally displaced people in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, in 2021. J. Countess/Getty Images Losing influence By Jeffrey Gettleman I’ve been an international correspondent for more than 20 years. Foreign aid isn’t just charity. It’s power. That was the original idea behind the United States Agency for International Development, which J.F.K. set up in the early 1960s to win the support of developing countries that might have otherwise drifted into the Soviet sphere. Elon Musk dismantled it in recent weeks. For now, most of its work has stopped and its worldwide staff has been called home. President Trump and his team have criticized a few progressive State Department programs, like a Colombian opera about a trans character and a D.E.I. music event in Ireland. But the core of U.S.A.I.D.’s mission has been helping the world’s poor, and it was a means to an end. “You have to understand,” a veteran American diplomat told me, “we didn’t do this work because we’re all a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals. We did it for influence.” In today’s newsletter, we’ll examine that effort — and the results it got. Good works How do you measure influence abroad? Experts have come up with the acronym DIME — diplomacy, information, military, economic — to describe the traditional levers of power. U.S.A.I.D. covers every aspect but the military one. By Malika Khurana When I was covering East Africa, I ran into U.S.A.I.D. all the time. I saw sacks of wheat stamped “U.S.A.I.D. From the American People” trucked out to famine areas in Somalia. I saw thin-walled, U.S.A.I.D.-funded schools in South Sudan giving kids their first crack at education. I met bright young people who won scholarships to study in the U.S., planting little seeds of pro-American sentiment everywhere. I wrote about American aid being stolen and misused, too, and there’s no doubt that U.S.A.I.D. was ripe for reform. There is a long-running debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid. Scholars have criticized it for failing to reduce poverty or stimulate economic development. There are infamous examples of expensive disasters — like a Norwegian-backed frozen fish factory in a very hot part of Kenya. But that was in the 1980s. These days, most aid for Kenya goes toward food security and health programs, which even critics acknowledge save lives. The billions Washington spent there has paid off. Over the years, Kenya has become one of America’s most reliable allies in the developing world. It has served as an operations center for antiterrorism strikes in the region. It buys more American goods like aircraft parts each year. As other African nations cozy up to Russia, a Kenyan diplomat delivered one of the most eloquent and rousing speeches at the United Nations condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now, foreign aid is not the only reason for this. Kenya has always been close to the West. But there is no doubt that many Kenyans are grateful for the American help and that the U.S.-Kenya relationship gets tighter each year. The aid Kenya was relying on has vanished, at least for now. That could leave Kenyans feeling burned, undermining the soft power the United States has spent decades — and billions — cultivating. Already, Beijing is desperate to find allies in Africa, said Michael H. Chung, an infectious disease doctor from Emory’s Global Health Institute who has worked in Kenya. “We will be ceding one of the world’s most economically dynamic and youthful regions to China,” Chung lamented. Consequences In Ethiopia in 2021. Jemal Countess/Getty Images The abrupt end to $44 billion in aid has been chaotic. And wasteful. Hundreds of millions of dollars of food may soon rot in the ports and warehouses where it is stuck. The battle against deadly disease, too, could suffer. Until last month, the United States provided medication for 20 million H.I.V. patients. The secretary of state said that work should continue, but now the program is in disarray. Without the meds, those lives are at risk and so is the effort to stop the spread and mutation of H.I.V. The ramifications are clearly not just humanitarian. Business executives fret that aggrieved nations might make it harder for Americans to get travel or work visas. Or they might cast more votes against American interests at the United Nations. Anti-Western sentiment in West Africa eventually calcified into official pro-Russia policies. American and French troops have been kicked out of one country after another. This is how it works. There may not be a decisive break but a steady, inexorable erosion of support. Some of Trump’s allies argue that U.S.A.I.D. was an irritant in the relationship with authoritarian countries like Hungary, for example. Viktor Orban, its strongman leader, often complains about U.S. support for pro-democracy groups. The view at U.S.A.I.D. was that influence is won not just from governments, but also from people — who may eventually take back their governments. Ukraine and Georgia are countries where aid supported Western-leaning democratic movements that eventually took power. In exchange for the freeze Elon Musk has imposed, the United States will save less than 1 percent of its budget. If those savings are put toward renewing or expanding Trump’s tax cut, which seems likely, those billions will flow directly from the mouths of the world’s poorest into the pockets of the world’s richest. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said that every aid dollar must answer three questions: “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” U.S.A.I.D., foreign policy experts say, answered all three. THE LATEST NEWS Trump and Europe Marco Rubio Pool photo by Evelyn Hockstein In private remarks, Rubio tried to reassure European allies that the U.S. hasn’t significantly changed its position on Russia. The allies were left confused. “If America leaves us, we are screwed”: In Bucha, the site of a massacre by Russia in 2022, Ukrainians are alarmed by Washington and Moscow’s warming relations. In his first term, Trump frequently threatened to leave NATO. Now, he’s trying to hollow it out from within, David Sanger writes. Government Overhaul The Trump administration is firing or reassigning F.B.I. and Homeland Security officials who combat foreign interference in U.S. elections. A federal judge allowed Trump’s mass firings to proceed, rejecting a challenge by labor unions. The Trump administration fired about 6,700 IRS employees, including those focused on auditing and collections, raising concerns about the agency’s ability to process tax returns. A division of Housing and Urban Development that helps rebuild homes after disasters is set to cut more than 80 percent of its staff. The C.I.A. plans to dismiss officers who worked on recruiting and diversity issues. It would be the agency’s largest layoff in almost 50 years. Migration The Trump administration has cleared out all of the migrants it sent to Guantánamo. It is unclear whether additional migrants will be sent to the base. The U.S. deported other migrants, including dozens of children, by plane to Costa Rica. Trump signed an executive order to eliminate federal benefits for undocumented immigrants, but most of them are ineligible for such benefits already. More on the Trump Administration The Senate confirmed Kash Patel, a former prosecutor and a fierce Trump loyalist, to lead the F.B.I. The vote was 51 to 49, with two Republicans voting against his nomination. As Tesla’s sales stagnate, Elon Musk, busy with a new job in Washington, seems to be doing little to turn the company around. News outlets, including The Times and Fox News, urged the White House to lift its ban of The Associated Press, which began after the A.P. said it would not adopt the name “Gulf of America.” More than half of the major actions Trump has taken appear to violate laws or the Constitution, according to a Times analysis. Here’s a look at all of them. More on Politics Gov. Kathy Hochul Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said she would not remove Mayor Eric Adams from office. But she announced new rules to limit his power and increase oversight of his office. Senator Mitch McConnell, 83, will not seek re-election. His term ends in 2026. Trump hosted a Black History Month reception. He praised Black Americans while facing criticism for his attacks on diversity programs. International Luis Rubiales, the former president of the Spanish soccer federation. Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A court convicted the former head of Spain’s soccer federation of sexual assault. Luis Rubiales forcibly kissed a member of the woman’s national team on the lips after it won the 2023 World Cup. Hamas returned the bodies of an elderly man and two young boys, but militants did not return the boys’ mother, as they had promised. Instead, a coffin they sent contained an unidentified body, jeopardizing the cease-fire. Multiple bus explosions in Israel have put the country on a terror alert. Meet Germany’s far right leader, Alice Weidel. She is anti-immigration and is married to a Sri Lankan-born woman. Other Big Stories Nearly one in 10 American adults identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., the survey firm Gallup found. The share has risen during the past decade as more young people identify as bisexual. New York’s attorney general sued 13 vape companies, accusing them of marketing the devices to children and teenagers. A Texas man was sentenced to 12 years for kidnapping a ride-share driver at gunpoint and forcing him to drive to Florida in a foiled plot to kidnap a social media influencer. Opinions “We’re in a cage — and we really need support”: Times Opinion gathered testimonies from people around the world that have been impacted by the U.S.A.I.D. funding freeze. Tariffs shift the tax burden away from the rich and toward the poor and the middle class, Kimberly Clausing argues. Here is a column by John McWhorter on “woke.” Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Mount Etna Etna Walk, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Mount Etna: Tourists are swarming an erupting volcano in Italy. Officials would rather they didn’t. Modern Love: A woman tries not to love her ex-husband as they co-parent and bike around Paris after their divorce. Snoring, exercising, declarations of love: Times readers shared their experiences with bad therapists. Strange dogs and trampolines: Emergency room doctors share the things you should avoid if you want to stay safe. Most clicked yesterday: “I found pornography on my husband’s computer. I’m furious!” Read our columnist's response. Lives Lived: Tom Fitzmorris was one of those colorful only-in-New Orleans personalities. He parlayed a savant’s mastery of the city’s menus and a love of the spotlight into a career as a restaurant critic that spanned five decades. He has died at 74. SPORTS Hockey: Canada beat the United States, 3-2, in an overtime game to win the inaugural 4 Nations Face-Off. Diplomacy: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted after Canada won, “You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game,” a jab at Trump’s annexation threats. N.B.A.: Spurs center Victor Wembanyama will miss the rest of the season with a blood clot. M.L.B.: In a spring training game, a Chicago Cubs pitcher became the first player in league history to successfully challenge an umpire’s call using the new automated ball-strike system. See a review. ARTS AND IDEAS Vanessa Saba When one feels their values have been compromised — either by themselves or others — it can lead to feelings of shame that in turn cause depression and anxiety. The mental health world has a word for this distress: moral injury. Read about how to recognize and handle it. More on culture “No Other Land,” a documentary which chronicles a community facing home demolition and expulsion in the occupied West Bank, is nominated for an Oscar. U.S. studios are unwilling to distribute it. Stephen Colbert mocked Trump for calling himself a king. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times Bake a German pancake in a 9-by-13-inch pan. Get the best results from your strength workout. Take a mirror pic that is actually good. Start a podcast with no money. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was foraging. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 24, 2025 Author Members Posted February 24, 2025 February 22, 2025 By Melissa Kirsch Good morning. When we lose things, it’s tempting to think we need to keep better track of them, to hold on to stuff more tightly. What if the opposite is true? María Jesús Contreras Lost causes A couple months ago, a friend of mine lost her phone. The next day, another friend lost his wallet. These things weren’t just misplaced; they didn’t surface the next day. They hadn’t slid out of a pocket and down between the couch cushions only to be found while tidying the house. The phone and wallet disappeared and didn’t come back. They seemed well and truly lost. We misplace things all the time. “Keys, phone, wallet,” I repeat as a mantra before I leave the house, the office, the bar, patting my pockets to make sure we’re intact. We’ve all experienced that “Oh no, where’s my …” feeling. We’re sure we lost some essential item and are hit with a feeling of doom so intense, it’s almost breathtaking. Then, just as quickly, that exquisite wash of relief when you find that your phone is, in fact, in the pocket of your coat — false alarm, crisis averted. You are, for a moment, a changed person, a person who glimpsed the horror of having to call the D.M.V., and you got a last-minute reprieve. You’ll keep better track of your stuff from now on. You never want to feel that way again. Misplacing stuff and then finding it is everyday nonsense. Losing things is rarer. The fact that two good friends lost important things back-to-back seemed weird, like a particular type of bad luck had zeroed in on my social circle. Someone wise once advised me that when things seem strange or confusing or too symbolically weighty, we might ask ourselves, “How would I interpret this if it were a dream?” It puts some distance between us and what’s happening. What if I had a dream in which people in my life kept losing their things? How would I interpret that? “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in “One Art.” The poem begins by discussing the loss of inconsequential things like keys, then moves on to bigger losses: “three loved houses,” “two rivers, a continent,” “even losing you.” Small losses prepare you for big ones. In the dream in which my friends keep losing seemingly insignificant things, I see symbols. The wallet and the phone are boring essentials, the untreasured, unremarked-upon tools of living that we take for granted until we lose them. Then their import comes into bright focus: What was even in my wallet? License, credit cards, so many receipts. Was there a gift card that I’ll never get back? Things were so easy before and I didn’t even know it. Now there’s all this confusion, all this hassle. Why are we so careless? Why do we take everything for granted? In my interpretation, I am tempted to see a lesson in holding on to things more tightly, in keeping better track, in cherishing harder. But when I asked my friend who lost her phone about the experience, she described two hours of panic. The next morning, though, the feeling had vanished. “I decided that if anyone wanted to get in touch with me, they could wait. That I could get everywhere I needed to, that I actually had everything I needed,” she said. Oh! Of course! Impermanence! I always forget. The Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield wrote of his teacher holding up a teacup, saying: “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” The cup is already broken. The phone and wallet are already lost. We have everything we need. The things we’re afraid of losing are already gone. Knowing this doesn’t keep the terror from setting in every time I think I’ve left my phone in a cab. But in the quiet moments when I’m calmer, I’m trying to meditate on the things I’m holding too tightly, to loosen my grip a little, to carry a little more lightly the teacup, the wallet or phone, the people and places and ideas I’m clutching, as if clutching will keep them from vanishing. For more From Wirecutter, how to prevent a lost phone from ruining your life. “19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art”: A close read of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” THE LATEST NEWS Middle East A poster shows Shiri Bibas. Mahmoud Illean/Associated Press Israel said the bodies of two young children held hostage in Gaza, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, bore evidence that their captors had murdered them. Hamas claimed in 2023 that an Israeli airstrike had killed the boys, as well as their mother. A body that Hamas turned over to the Red Cross on Friday was confirmed as that of the boys’ mother, Shiri Bibas, whose capture during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack became a symbol of Israel’s anguish. Hamas began releasing more Israeli hostages this morning, handing over five to the Red Cross in two separate ceremonies in Gaza. Israel is set to free about 600 Palestinian detainees in return. President Trump appeared to back away from his plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza, after Egypt and Jordan said they would not cooperate. “I’m not forcing it. I’m just going to sit back and recommend it,” he told Fox News. Trump Administration The Trump administration fired several top Pentagon officials last night, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the head of the Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force. The Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot remove the head of an agency that protects government whistle-blowers — for now. But it may revisit the case soon. Elon Musk’s government-slashing DOGE team has published an online ledger of its cuts. It’s filled with accounting errors, outdated data and other mistakes, a Times analysis found. “See you in court”: At a White House meeting, Gov. Janet Mills of Maine clashed publicly with Trump over his executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. Trump plans to detain undocumented migrants at military sites across the U.S. The Associated Press sued three Trump administration officials who barred the news agency from covering White House press events. Other Big Stories A federal judge delayed his ruling on whether to drop the corruption case against Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor. The mayor of Los Angeles removed the city’s fire chief, criticizing her for a lack of preparedness ahead of last month’s wildfires. Russian forces are closing in on Dnipropetrovsk, a large Ukrainian province with a major industrial base. An invasion would complicate peace talks. Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered a pharaoh’s tomb, the first excavation of a royal burial chamber there since the discovery of Tutankhamen’s in 1922. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV A scene from “The Monkey,” directed by Osgood Perkins. Neon In the horror comedy “The Monkey,” adapted from a short story by Stephen King, “deaths are so grisly and sudden and weird that they end up being hilarious,” our critic writes. The Times spoke with Theo James, the movie’s star. With “S.N.L.” turning 50, The Times dug through boxes of scripts, notes, photographs and mail from Lorne Michaels’s archives. “Ex-Husbands,” a dramedy about a bachelor party starring James Norton and Griffin Dunne, is one of seven movies our critics are talking about this week. “I was waiting for them to screw up”: The medical drama “The Pitt” is set at a fictional trauma center in Pittsburgh. The show has impressed doctors with its accuracy. Theater Nick Jonas, Sadie Sink and Christian Slater began their acting careers as kids on Broadway. This year, they’re all returning to the stage in New York. George Clooney will make his Broadway debut in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie “Good Night, and Good Luck.” He’s ready, but also terrified. Cynthia Erivo, the star of “Wicked,” is set to host this year’s Tony Awards. She won a Tony in 2016 for her role in “The Color Purple.” More Culture To combat knockoffs, Birkenstock claimed its sandals were a copyrighted work of art. A German court wasn’t convinced. It has been a big week for the rapper ASAP Rocky: After a jury acquitted him of shooting charges, Ray-Ban made him its first-ever creative director, Women’s Wear Daily reported. Drake has a new album. “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast, discussed his post-Kendrick-beef comeback. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. CULTURE CALENDAR By Desiree Ibekwe ? “Suits LA” (Tomorrow): In 2023, “Suits” — a show that had been off the air for four years — was the most watched show on Netflix. It’s easy to see why. The show was sleek and light, sexy and fun. What’s more, it introduced the world to Meghan Markle. Now, we go again in “Suits LA,” a spinoff series. Like the original, it follows the lives of improbably good-looking lawyers. Unlike the original, it’s set in the world of Hollywood entertainment law. I’m sure it’ll be just as fun, but whether it produces a star who helps convulse a centuries-old British institution remains to be seen. RECIPE OF THE WEEK David Malosh for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Salmon Niçoise With Orzo Perfect for chilly evenings when you long for summer, Ali Slagle’s one-pan salmon niçoise with orzo carries the bright, sunny flavors of Provence in an easy dinner. This colorful mix of salmon, green beans and tomatoes is made in the same pan as the olive-speckled orzo, but added in stages so each element winds up perfectly cooked. And if it doesn’t feel like niçoise without tuna, feel free to substitute a can of it for the salmon. Either way, it’s sure to evoke warmer days to come. T MAGAZINE Photograph by Mark Kean. Styled by Jacob K Click the cover above to read this weekend’s issue of T, The Times’s style magazine. REAL ESTATE Mia Sinclair Jenness on the West Side of Manhattan. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times The Hunt: After years of subletting and living out of suitcases, a young actor decided to find a “soft place to land” in New York. Which home did she choose? Play our game. What you get for $750,000: A 1930 brick-and-stone house in Oklahoma City; a midcentury modern house in Tempe, Ariz; or a saltbox house in Madison, N.H. LIVING Birkenstocks and the Baguette: A group of experts discuss the shoes and bags that transformed fashion. Travel: Spend 36 hours in Banff, Alberta. Community: An introverted writer got more than she bargained for when she moved into a new home: She made friends with her entire neighborhood. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER The case for a cozy gift I wear a pair of socks to bed every night. I find they help send me to sleep faster by warming up my frigid toes. (I’m not alone in this, I swear: There are some studies that show socks can help you fall asleep.) The ones I wear are not only extremely soft and good-looking — they have become my go-to gift. Especially in dreary late winter, there is perhaps nothing kinder than brightening someone’s day with a warm and luxe upgrade. — Haley Jo Lewis GAME OF THE WEEK The Lakers’ new star duo, LeBron James and Luka Doncic. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images Dallas Mavericks vs. Los Angeles Lakers, N.B.A.: When Dallas traded Luka Doncic, the 25-year-old face of the franchise, to the Lakers this month, Mavs fans spiraled. They protested outside the stadium; they protested inside the stadium; they canceled their season tickets. This is the two teams’ first matchup since the trade, and it could be an emotional game for Doncic, who had been with Dallas his entire career and who, by all accounts, did not want to leave. Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern on TNT NOW TIME TO PLAY Six gray hexagons orbiting one yellow hexagon. Each gray hexagon features a letter: E, W, Y, N, H, O. The yellow hexagon shows the letter D. Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was trillionth. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 24, 2025 Author Members Posted February 24, 2025 February 23, 2025 By German Lopez Good morning. We’re covering a lesser-known side of Chinese censorship — as well as emails to government employees, the pope’s health and a book to read. Marvel Rivals Marvel Chinese influence Marvel Rivals is one of the biggest video games in the world. Since its launch in December, more than 40 million people have signed up to fight one another as comic book heroes like Iron Man and Wolverine. But when players used the game’s text chat to talk with teammates and opponents, they noticed something: Certain phrases, including “free Hong Kong” and “Tiananmen Square,” were not allowed. While Marvel Rivals is based on an iconic American franchise, it was developed by a Chinese company, NetEase Games. It has become the latest example of Chinese censorship creeping into media that Americans consume. You can’t type “free Tibet,” “free Xinjiang,” “Uyghur camps,” “Taiwan is a country” or “1989” (the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre) in the chat. You can type “America is a dictatorship” but not “China is a dictatorship.” Even memes aren’t spared. “Winnie the Pooh” is banned, because people have compared China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to the cartoon bear. The restrictions are largely confined to China-related topics. You can type “free Palestine,” “free Kashmir” and “free Crimea.” Why does all of this matter? Video games are not just sources of entertainment; they are also social platforms. Every day, hundreds of millions of children and adults log on to games like Fortnite, World of Warcraft and, yes, Marvel Rivals to play together and hang out. For many young people, these games are as social as Facebook or X. China’s video game industry is growing. As it does, the country’s authoritarian leaders are setting the terms of how these social platforms work. Growing problem In Shanghai. Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images China’s market, with hundreds of millions of potential customers, has long enticed game developers. But companies have to play by China’s rules to get in, and that means accepting censorship. (Other industries, including movies and sports, have faced similar challenges.) Until recently, this censorship mostly appeared in the Chinese versions of Western-made games. China deemed the military shooter PUBG too violent, so its developers reworked it. When someone shoots and kills another player in the Chinese version, the victim doesn’t exactly die; he kneels and waves goodbye before vanishing. As China’s game developers have grown and gone international, however, they’ve also exported their style of censorship. Last year, the Chinese developer Game Science released Black Myth: Wukong. It was a hit with Western audiences, and it became the first Chinese-made game to be nominated for game of the year at the Game Awards, the industry’s equivalent to best picture at the Oscars. But before the game’s release, a company affiliated with Game Science told people streaming the game that they should avoid talking about certain topics, including “feminist propaganda” and Covid. The problem stands to get worse. As China’s economy grows, Western developers will have greater incentives to release games there. China’s game industry is taking off and will continue to export games. Chinese publishers, such as the conglomerate Tencent, have also bought Western developers, and the Chinese government could push them to censor their games, too. Player pushback In some cases, consumers have pushed back against censorship. In 2019, the American developer Blizzard suspended a player from Hong Kong and revoked his prize money after he said, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times,” at a competitive event. Many fans saw the punishment as Blizzard bowing to censorship so it could continue to sell games in China. The fans started a boycott and canceled subscriptions to Blizzard games. Members of Congress spoke out. Blizzard eventually reduced the player’s punishment and returned his prize money. Chinese developers are insulated from this kind of public criticism. But Western companies like Blizzard aren’t. With Marvel Rivals, Disney licensed its intellectual property for the game. Microsoft allows the game on its Xbox consoles. The Valve Corporation, based in Bellevue, Wash., hosts the game on Steam, the biggest marketplace for computer games. In that sense, the responsibility for censorship is shared by China’s leaders and the Western companies that play along. Related: I recommend reading The Times’s exploration of Metroidvanias, a video game genre that leverages mysterious, mazelike settings to evoke feelings of discovery and progression. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration Elon Musk ordered federal workers to send an email detailing their accomplishments last week or lose their jobs. Some agencies, including the F.B.I. and the State Department, told employees to hold off. At CPAC, President Trump celebrated his firing of federal workers and his attempt to purge the government of his political enemies. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, fired the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. Maine is facing a federal investigation after it refused to comply with Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. Its governor told Trump, “See you in court.” German Election Germany is holding national elections today. Polls show the Christian Democratic Union, a center-right party, with a comfortable lead. Read what to know. The nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party could finish second. A surge in youth support has helped elevate it. More International News Pope Francis at the Vatican last month. Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Pope Francis, 88, is in critical condition but had a restful night, the Vatican says. Catholics around the world prayed for his recovery. Israel delayed the release of more than 600 Palestinian prisoners. It wants Hamas to commit to free hostages from Gaza without “humiliating ceremonies.” Both sides accused the other of violating the cease-fire agreement. Austria is using geothermal energy to heat homes to wean itself off Russian natural gas. Other Big Stories Measles outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico have sickened nearly 100 people. Most of the cases are in an area with low vaccination rates. A police officer was killed while responding to a shooting involving a gunman who had taken staff members hostage at a hospital in York County, Pa. The authorities have linked a series of violent confrontations across the United States, which have left at least six people dead, to a fringe group known as the Zizians. MSNBC’s new president is changing the lineup. Joy Reid’s evening news show is being canceled. TRUMP’S ACTIONS It can be hard to keep up with the deluge of news from the White House. The Times has created a page to track the Trump administration — including its major executive orders, memos, lawsuits and social media posts. Here are some from the past week: D.E.I.: The Education Department said schools had two weeks to end race-based programs. Military spending: The defense secretary told the Pentagon to plan to cut 8 percent from the defense budget over each of the next five years. Layoffs: The I.R.S. fired about 6,700 employees — more than 5,000 of whom worked for teams that handle auditing and collections. Rehiring: The Department of Agriculture moved to rehire some recently fired employees involved in the government’s bird flu response. Military leadership: Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s senior military officer. Officials said Trump was upset about a video the chairman made in 2020 about George Floyd’s killing. See the full list here. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Some scholars say the U.S. is already in a constitutional crisis. Who bears responsibility? Trump. Behind a curtain of culture war distractions, the president is consolidating power. “Trump has unconstitutionally usurped control over the steering wheel of democracy, shoved the gear into reverse and slammed on the gas all while making sure you have enough going on to not look up from your iPad in the backseat.” Aidan Cummins writes for The Daily Cardinal. Congress. Thirty years of congressional dysfunction brought us to this point, and their continuing inaction enables Trump to do as he wishes. “Members of Congress are not helpless cogs in a political machine they cannot control. Individually, collectively, they have agency, responsibility and power,” Steven Pearlstein writes for Roll Call. FROM OPINION A Ukrainian soldier who was injured by mines. Iva Sidash Ukrainians are tired of fighting. But pride and determination won’t allow them to end the war on Russia’s terms, Artem Chekh writes. JD Vance and Elon Musk should not lend credibility to Germany’s far-right party, which is both pro-Russian and anti-American, James Kirchick writes. Here’s a column by Maureen Dowd on Trump portraying himself as king. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Leonard Peltier Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times A long journey: Leonard Peltier spent 50 years in prison for the murders of two F.B.I. agents. Now he’s back on his home reservation to serve the remainder of his sentence. Coin purge: If the U.S. gets rid of pennies, it might want to consider scrapping nickels, too: The five-cent pieces cost about 14 cents to make. Vows: A “perfect fit” in love and fashion. Most clicked yesterday: See what $475,000 can get you in Manhattan. Lives Lived: Carlos Diegues was a film director who highlighted Brazil’s ethnic richness and its social turbulence. He died at 84. BOOK OF THE WEEK . By Elisabeth Egan “Dream State,” by Eric Puchner: Weddings gone wrong have long been fictional catnip, but Eric Puchner puts a fresh spin on the plot in his second novel, “Dream State,” which Oprah Winfrey just selected as her 111th book club pick. The trouble starts when Cece, a bright-eyed bride-to-be, arrives in Montana to finalize the details of her wedding alongside her husband-to-be’s depressed best friend, who is (to her chagrin) performing the ceremony. The pair develop an unexpected rapport. Then norovirus disrupts the nuptials, setting in motion a chain of events that spans 50 years, two generations and an ever-worsening climate crisis that leads to respirator masks and a death cult. If this sounds like a bit of a bait and switch — a romantic romp turned dystopian — well, it might be. But it’s also a thoughtful meditation on the seismic impact of small decisions on human and earthly conditions. It couldn’t be more timely. More on books Our reviewer described “Dream State” as “a coming-of-old-age story, beginning after the traditional bildungsroman would end and running to the final chapter of life.” A new book by the journalist Katherine Stewart finds a far-right movement steeped in resentment, suspicious of reason and determined to dominate. THE INTERVIEW Ed Yong Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By David Marchese This week’s subject for The Interview is the best-selling science writer Ed Yong, who talked about how engaging with nature helped him combat feelings of professional burnout. When you’re watching birds — and this could apply to the natural world writ large — there is so much going on beyond our comprehension. Because of our sensory capabilities as human beings, we are condemned to having only an ankle-deep understanding of what it is to be alive on Earth. To me, that’s humbling and mind-blowing. What do you think? I fully agree. I mean, that is a beautiful précis of basically my entire body of work. Nailed it! [Laughs.] I can go home now, right? All of it is about the idea that much of the world is hidden from us, that we don’t perceive it and don’t understand it, and that it is worth understanding and it is necessary to understand. I have a curmudgeonly question. Developing an awareness of the magic that’s happening all around us at any given moment, and understanding that there’s this vast cosmic dance playing out — in the abstract, I can see how internalizing those perspectives might change one’s perspective. But did your understanding of the bigger existential stuff you were writing about actually help you when you were struggling? I can say that thinking about these ideas constantly really helped me. It felt like a salve to all of that moral injury and despair that I was feeling. It doesn’t cure it, but it fills my life with wonder and joy, and that acts as a buffer against all the other existential dread and fear that we have to grapple with. There is a kind of implosive effect of the modern world, and the science and nature writing that I’m prioritizing, and the birding that I do, are all counters to that. Read more of the interview here. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Photo illustration by Mike McQuade. Source photographs: Fred Greaves/Reuters; David Moir/Reuters. Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Turn store-bought rotisserie chicken into a healthy dinner. Embrace monochromatic dressing. Use sleep headphones. MEAL PLAN Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Cyd Raftus McDowell. Emily Weinstein’s favorite recipes to make at home aren’t the most elaborate — they’re simple, with a single technique or ingredient that makes the dish distinctive. In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily suggests meals that feature what she terms “lightbulb moments” including roasted chicken thighs with hot honey and lime, and blistered broccoli pasta with walnuts, pecorino and mint. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was honeydew. Can you put eight historical events — including Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the invention of the Ferris wheel, and the development of Chinese porcelain — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. P.S. It’s been nearly five years since the coronavirus was declared a pandemic. Do you travel differently now? Tell The Times how your habits have changed. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 24, 2025 Author Members Posted February 24, 2025 February 24, 2025 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We’re covering Germany’s election — as well as Elon Musk, the pope and the SAG Awards. Friedrich Merz Hannibal Hanschke/EPA, via Shutterstock The left’s slump Germany yesterday became the latest country where voters rejected a left-leaning government largely because of their unhappiness over immigration and the economy. Germany’s next chancellor is likely to be Friedrich Merz, a former corporate lawyer who has promised to crack down on migration, cut taxes and regulation and adopt a hawkish policy toward Russia. Merz leads a center-right alliance that finished first in yesterday’s election, with 29 percent of the vote. A far-right party, Alternative for Germany, that promises even tougher immigration policies — but is friendly toward Russia — finished second, with 21 percent of the vote. The center-left Social Democrats, who led the government for the past four years, tumbled to third place, with 16 percent of the vote. It was their worst showing in a national election since at least 1890. Merz now faces the challenge of putting together a coalition that includes more than half of the seats in the German Parliament. Like other mainstream politicians, he has vowed to exclude the far right from his coalition because of its extremism, including its embrace of slogans and symbols with Nazi overtones. You can read more about the coalition scenarios here. You can also read more about Merz. Two big issues The campaign was dominated by two issues that have also shaped recent politics in the United States and many other parts of Europe: immigration and the economy. In Germany, the share of the population born in another country has reached nearly 20 percent, up from 12.5 percent in 2015. The increases have brought rapid change to communities. And although many recent immigrants have fared well in school and in the job market, many others have not. Crime became a salient issue in the campaign. Recent data suggests that foreigners commit about 40 percent of crimes in Germany, Graeme Wood of The Atlantic pointed out. (Immigrants in the U.S., by contrast, commit crimes at a lower rate than natives, despite President Trump’s false claims.) Over the past 10 months, Germany has experienced at least four fatal attacks by migrants who had failed to receive asylum but nonetheless remained in the country. Volkswagen employees demonstrating last year. Ronny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The struggling German economy, once the envy of the world, also loomed over the campaign. The auto industry has not kept pace with the shift toward electric vehicles, and Germany lacks a culture of entrepreneurship, many economists say. “Unlike in America last year, there is no one, on the left or the right, arguing that actually things are going pretty well economically,” Jim Tankersley, The Times’s Berlin bureau chief, told me. “When you talk to voters, it is usually the very first thing they bring up.” Where the left wins Germany’s election continues a slump for left-leaning parties in affluent countries, often connected to immigration and the economy. Those two issues helped Trump win the presidency. In Canada, Justin Trudeau has announced his resignation. In much of the Europe, the far right has become more popular. Some of these trends are part of a general backlash to political establishment, in response to Covid and post-pandemic inflation. But it’s not just an anti-incumbent mood; the political left is having a harder time than the right in most countries. There is one glaring exception, and it happens to be a country on Germany’s northern border: Denmark. There, the center-left Social Democrats have run the country since 2019. They won re-election in 2022, after Covid had receded. Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister. Epa-Efe/EPA, via Shutterstock Under Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who was only 41 when she took office, the party has compiled a strikingly progressive record. It has expanded abortion rights, enacted ambitious climate policies, cracked down on private-equity firms, made the retirement system more favorable to low-income workers and spent a greater share of G.D.P. on Ukraine aid than any other country. How did the party do all of this during a period of right-wing ascendancy? I recently traveled to Denmark to study that question, and the answer has a lot to do with immigration. The Times Magazine published my story from Denmark this morning. I hope it will help you better understand politics not just in Denmark but also in Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere. THE LATEST NEWS Politics Trump-appointed top officials at several federal agencies told employees to ignore Elon Musk’s demand that they email a summary of everything they did last week or face being fired. Senator Chris Murphy has become a vocal critic of Trump, using social media and other platforms to denounce what he calls a billionaire takeover of American democracy. In her first interview since becoming director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard accused security agencies of eroding privacy and civil liberties. War in Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky Paula Bronstein/Getty Images Volodymyr Zelensky rebuffed demands from the Trump administration for Ukrainian natural resources and rejected peace talks that exclude Ukraine. He also said he would step down if Ukraine were allowed to join NATO. European leaders are grappling with how to support Ukraine and ensure the continent’s security. Trump’s election has opened new possibilities for Vladimir Putin. International Pope Francis, 88, remains in critical condition at a Rome hospital, where he is being treated for pneumonia, a complex infection and kidney problems. In the biggest pedophilia case in French history, a doctor, Joël Le Scouarnec, will stand trial on charges of raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, mostly children, and mostly his patients, over 25 years. Investigators found diaries and spreadsheets detailing the abuse. North Korean laborers are toiling on Chinese tuna boats for years at a time, while their salaries go to the North Korean government. Migrants deported from the U.S. and detained in a Panama City hotel have held up a sign asking for help through a window. Take a close look at one image. For the first time in two decades, Israel has deployed tanks to the West Bank as part of an expanded military operation against Palestinian militants. Other Big Stories Lyons ReadyCare and Sysco Imperial frozen shakes. Food and Drug Administration Frozen shakes sold to nursing homes and hospitals have been recalled. They have been linked to a deadly listeria outbreak that has killed at least 11 people since 2018. New York City’s egg shortage has led to wildly varying prices, long lines and even rationing at some stores. Greenpeace faces a lawsuit from the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, over protests. At least three people died and another was missing after a boat capsized near Staten Island. Opinions Harriet Lenneman To succeed in life, everyone should have a nemesis, Rachel Feintzeig writes. Cuts to the I.R.S. will not lower your taxes. They will only make tax filing more burdensome for everyone, seven former I.R.S. commissioners write. Here are columns by David French on Trump and Putin and M. Gessen on poets in Odesa, Ukraine. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Peaks in the range known as the Rum Cuillin. Nicholas J. R. White for The New York Times Isle of Rum: The wild Scottish island is now a dark-sky sanctuary. See photos. Parade of planets: All seven of Earth’s neighbors will be visible at dusk this week. National Parks: See how layoffs could affect spring break visitors. In trouble: They were buried in debt. Read how they got out of it. Unreadable: A new exhibit in New York showcases objects designed to look like books, including a cigarette lighter, a flask and a vanity set. Ethicist: Help! I’ve learned my sister’s therapist is also a spiritual medium. Most clicked yesterday: Investigations into six killings are looking at a fringe group known as the Zizians. They are followers of someone known as Ziz, who blogged about self-improvement, ethics and A.I. Metropolitan Diary: A train dance party. Lives Lived: Lynne Marie Stewart played Miss Yvonne on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” among more than 150 credits in a six-decade acting career. She died at 78. SPORTS N.B.A.: Joel Embiid, the 76ers star who was M.V.P. in 2023, is considering ending his season early to undergo knee surgery. Our columnist argues he should shut it down. N.F.L.: As the combine kicks off this week, the Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders — considered a polarizing prospect — will not work out for teams. College basketball: Arizona apologized after its students heckled B.Y.U.’s team with a derogatory chant about Mormons, known formally as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ARTS AND IDEAS The winning cast of “Conclave.” Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “Conclave” won best picture at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, beating “Anora.” Timothée Chalamet won best actor for “A Complete Unknown,” and Demi Moore won best actress for “The Substance.” Read more about the awards and see the best outfits. More on culture The online store Quince is making a fortune by selling duplicates of luxury items, The Cut reports. Read a letter from a writer to “the perfect girl next door.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times Make keema with chicken, lamb or beef. Nourish your skin with the best Korean beauty products. Try a massage ball instead of a foam roller. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were appliance, capellini, pelican and pinnacle. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. —David Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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 February 25, 2025 Author Members Posted February 25, 2025 February 25, 2025 Good morning. Today, my colleague Benjamin Mueller explains how government cuts are slowing medical research. We’re also covering Emmanuel Macron, German elections and a sonnet. —David Leonhardt At the National Institutes of Health. Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Paying for science By Benjamin Mueller I cover the National Institutes of Health. The Trump administration stormed into office, loudly firing workers and closing diversity programs. But behind the scenes, it has also brought biomedical research to the brink of crisis by holding up much of the $47 billion the United States spends on the field every year. The world’s leading medical labs can be found in the United States, and they rely on grants from the National Institutes of Health. The agency has stopped vetting future studies on cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and other ailments. Trump aides have said they just need time to review spending their predecessors had promised, but it’s unclear what they’re looking for at the N.I.H. or when scholars can expect to start receiving money again. In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk you through what happened — and why it matters. A complex machine Late last month, when the Trump administration froze government grants, a federal judge said it couldn’t just hold back money Congress had agreed to spend. But spending money at the N.I.H., which awards more than 60,000 grants per year, isn’t so simple. That’s because new grants endure a tortured bureaucratic process. The agency has to notify the public of grant review meetings in The Federal Register, a government publication. Then scientists and N.I.H. officials meet to discuss the proposals. The problem is that the Trump administration banned those announcements “indefinitely.” So new research projects can’t get approved. In effect, scientists say, the Trump administration is circumventing the court order. Health officials didn’t block research outright, but by shutting down the process, they’re still not spending much of the money Congress allocated to various research goals. The administration has also proposed other big changes, saying that universities should bear more of the “indirect costs” of research: maintaining lab space, paying support staff. Trump aides say the changes would trim administrative bloat and free up more government money for research. Labs hit pause Scientists are panicked, and hundreds of studies are at a standstill, including ones on pancreatic cancer, brain injuries and child health. Last week alone, the N.I.H. canceled 42 of 47 scheduled meetings to assess new grants. Some examples of stalled projects: For years, Steffanie Strathdee at the University of California San Diego has followed drug users to research overdoses, which kill some 100,000 people in the United States each year. Her investigation of H.I.V. infections in that group was ready to begin — but came to an abrupt halt when the N.I.H. canceled a review panel meeting this month. “Everything is absolutely frozen,” she told me. “It’ll just sit there, hanging in limbo.” Anthony Richardson at the University of Pittsburgh was expecting a review panel to weigh a grant application of his on staph infections in people with diabetes, a disease that afflicts more than one-tenth of Americans. It never happened. “I am not 100 percent sure what their motives are,” he said. In response to all the uncertainty, universities are retrenching. The University of Pittsburgh froze Ph.D. admissions. Columbia University’s medical school paused hiring and spending. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology froze the hiring of nonfaculty employees. Some lab leaders told me they were making contingency plans to fire scientists. Graduate students are searching for new sources of funding. What next? It’s hard to say how long the holdup will last. The Trump administration hasn’t submitted a single new grant review meeting to The Federal Register since a day after it took office. And even if it started adding new ones, the agency traditionally gives several weeks’ notice. At risk are not only the tens of thousands of grants the N.I.H. awards each year, but also American dominance of biomedical research. Every dollar the agency spends on research generates more than two dollars in economic activity, the N.I.H. has said. Scores of patents follow. By some measures, the United States produces more influential health-sciences research than the next 10 leading countries combined. The science unfolds across the country, including in red states, where lawmakers have complained about proposed changes to indirect costs. Those findings often fuel pharmaceutical advancements, laying a foundation for drugs and vaccines long before private funders see such work as worth investing in. Even Ozempic traces its roots back in part to work at the N.I.H on animal venom. Scientists found that the toxin from Gila monster lizards seemed to have particular physiological effects, helping lead eventually to one of the world’s most profitable and promising drugs. New advances like those, scientists say, are in danger. THE LATEST NEWS Government Overhaul Elon Musk Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press A rift emerged in the White House over Elon Musk’s demand that federal workers justify their jobs: Personnel officials told workers that the order was voluntary, while President Trump called it “genius” and said anyone who did not comply would be punished. The F.D.A. rehired dozens of specialized employees it fired last week. At a hearing over Musk’s DOGE effort, a federal judge in Washington expressed skepticism that the operation was constitutional. A lewd fake video depicting Trump and Musk played on monitors in the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The video appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence. More on the Trump Administration Emmanuel Macron and President Trump. Doug Mills/The New York Times Emmanuel Macron visited Trump at the White House. The two appeared friendly, but their perspectives on the war in Ukraine diverged. Macron also corrected Trump. Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to lead Medicare and Medicaid, has financial ties to medical companies that could overlap with the job. Speaker Mike Johnson is delaying the confirmation of Representative Elise Stefanik as U.N. ambassador because he can’t afford to lose her vote in the House. Protesters hung an upside-down American flag on El Capitan, the towering rock formation at Yosemite, in response to Trump’s layoffs at the National Park Service. MAGA references on a library plaque have divided Huntington Beach, a Southern California surf town. War in Ukraine This Ukrainian soldier lost part of his left arm in combat in 2022. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times “I couldn’t abandon my brothers”: Some of Ukraine’s wounded soldiers, including amputees, are returning to the front. For three years, Volodymyr Zelensky’s showmanship helped keep his military supplied with Western weapons. Now, though, the approach is falling flat. Ukraine and the U.S. are nearing a deal that would grant Washington a share of Kyiv’s revenues from natural resources. Israel-Hamas War The cease-fire between Hamas and Israel expires on Sunday. The two sides are yet to begin negotiations for an extension. Israel is intensifying its operations in the West Bank. It says it’s combating rising militancy in the area; Palestinians say they fear being permanently displaced. A Hamas official expressed reservations about the Oct. 7 attacks, telling The Times that he would not have supported the plan if he knew the devastation it would bring to Gaza. Thousands of tons of solid waste have piled up in the streets of Gaza. The war has crippled the enclave’s ability to dispose of garbage and sewage, Reuters reports. Other Big Stories Lester Holt Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times Lester Holt announced that he was leaving NBC’s nightly news show. Jen Psaki, who was White House press secretary under Joe Biden, is getting a prime-time show on MSNBC. Germany’s far-right party, the AfD, has become more popular because of shrinking and aging populations, crumbling government services and sluggish economic growth, Amanda Taub writes. A far-left party has also made a comeback. NASA announced that an asteroid that previously had a small chance of hitting Earth no longer poses a risk. Apple plans to spend half a trillion dollars and hire 20,000 people in the U.S. over the next four years. The company also intends to open an A.I. server factory in Texas. A highway bridge collapse in South Korea killed four workers. New York City’s congestion pricing program appears to be working: Vehicle traffic is down, foot traffic is up and toll revenue has exceeded expectations. Opinions At CPAC. Damon Winter/The New York Times The variety of Trump merch at CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative activists, is evidence of his singular place in the Republican Party, Katherine Miller writes. See photographs. Democrats should do nothing to oppose Trump, James Carville writes: His administration will crash and burn by itself. Here are columns by Michelle Goldberg on the F.B.I. deputy director and Thomas Edsall on Trump’s intimidation. Subscribe Today The Morning highlights a small portion of the journalism that The New York Times offers. To access all of it, become a subscriber with this introductory offer. MORNING READS Alberta Wright owned a vintage clothing store and a restaurant named Jezebel. Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times Trailblazers: In the late 20th century, a group of Black women created restaurants that changed New York dining. A closer read: Our critic guides you through a wild and unruly sonnet by Gwendolyn Brooks. Ask Vanessa: “Should men wear white jeans?” Pretenders: Psychologists are warning that chatbots posing as therapists could encourage users to commit harmful acts. Health: Experts explain what they do, and don’t, recommend to treat cold sores. Living Small: A couple left Brooklyn to downsize upstate. Most clicked yesterday: A photo of migrants deported from the U.S., seen through the windows of a hotel in Panama. One woman scrawled “Help” in lipstick, another held up a napkin with a plea for help. Lives Lived: Clint Hill was the Secret Service agent who leaped onto President John F. Kennedy’s limousine as it came under fire in Dallas and kept a scrambling Jacqueline Kennedy from falling. He died at 93. SPORTS N.F.L.: The Green Bay Packers submitted a proposal to the NFL’s competition committee to ban the “tush push,” a tactic of the Super Bowl-winning Eagles. Scouting Combine: Young players’ arms are measured and compared by the fraction of an inch. See what scouts look for. N.B.A.: The Bulls beat the 76ers, 142-110. Philadelphia has lost eight straight games. ARTS AND IDEAS Photo Illustration by The New York Times; H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock, via Getty Images One hundred years ago today, the musician Art Gillham entered a studio in New York to test a soon-to-be-transformative tool: the microphone. The technology reshaped how artists perform and how we listen. Read about how the microphone changed music. More on culture Roberta Flack in 1969. Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images Roberta Flack, a magnetic singer and pianist who blended soul, jazz and folk, died at 88. Majestic anthems like “Killing Me Softly” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” made her one of the most popular artists of the 1970s. The Met will return an ancient bronze griffin to Greece after determining that it was probably stolen from a Greek museum in the 1930s. Late night hosts laughed about Musk’s demands. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Christopher Testani for The New York Times Swirl sour cream into a bowl of gombaleves, a Hungarian creamy mushroom soup. Improve your balance. Become a better friend. Make a photo book. Protect your online accounts with a physical security key. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were attainability, banality and inability. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter referred incorrectly to the top prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. It’s awarded for the best performance by a cast, not for the best picture. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Editor: David Leonhardt Deputy Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Desiree Ibekwe, Brent Lewis, German Lopez, Ashley Wu News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch 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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