Members phkrause Posted December 3, 2025 Author Members Posted December 3, 2025 December 1, 2025 Good morning, and happy December. Today I’m turning the newsletter over to some of my colleagues to answer your questions about drones. — Sam But first, the latest news: Sri Lanka: The death toll from a cyclone there rose to more than 350. Boat strikes: A top Republican joined Democrats in Congress to suggest the military might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean. Immigration: A college student who came to the U.S. at age 7 was deported while trying to travel home to visit family in Texas for Thanksgiving. Also, it’s Cookie Week, which means the holiday baking season has officially started. We share the first recipe below. A drone during a training exercise in Louisiana. Meridith Kohut for The New York Times Your drone questions By Adam B. Kushner I’m the editor of this newsletter. Drones are already reshaping our lives — in surveillance, in photography and especially in war. One Times reporter recently described how a U.S. soldier piloted a drone into enemy territory, spotted enemy cannons and destroyed them. Another profiled a pair of former teenage drone racers who now have contracts to sell their devices to the military. We asked readers of The Morning for their questions about drones. Today, Times journalists answer. Personal use What are the laws for personal use of drones? Do they vary by state? | Ron Smith, Folly Beach, S.C. Niraj Chokshi, who covers aviation, writes: Flying a drone for fun isn’t as simple as unpacking the box and taking off. Federal rules require you take a free safety test and keep proof you passed. You also must keep the drone in your line of sight, away from manned aircraft, below 400 feet and out of controlled airspace (for example, around airports) unless you have Federal Aviation Administration approval. Drones that weigh more than a half a pound must be registered. And local governments sometimes write their own rules, too. (In New York City, you need a police permit to fly.) Can someone fly a drone above my home? How low can they fly it? Can I press charges against someone who invades my property with a drone? | Rainbow Koehl, Bellingham, Wash. Evan Gorelick, a reporter for this newsletter, writes: Yes, people can fly drones above your house. But there are limits. A drone can’t simply park outside your window and shoot a video, the same way people can’t walk up your driveway and peep into your home. (That could be considered trespassing.) You probably couldn’t sue someone for flying a drone near your property, but you could call the police and press charges for specific privacy violations, trespass and harassment if the drone activity is intrusive. Drones above Miami. Joe Raedle/Getty Images If one hovers over your property, can you shoot it down? | Dennis Payne, Columbia, Mo. Evan continues: No. The government considers drones “aircraft,” which means they have the same legal standing as commercial passenger jets. Under federal law, damaging, destroying or disabling aircraft is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Can law enforcement use drones to snoop, including through windows, without a warrant? | Lydia Sells, Austin, Texas Evan continues: It depends where you live. The Supreme Court says aerial surveillance does not always constitute an invasive search under the Fourth Amendment. But depending on the circumstances, it can. States generally get to draw that line. In Tennessee, for instance, the police can use drones to patrol a music festival without a search warrant, but they can’t surveil private property. At least 18 states have passed laws requiring officers to obtain warrants before they conduct drone surveillance. I have a small hobby drone and I love to travel, but drone laws are different in each country. Is there any type of organization that is trying to make regulations on an international level? | Kristin Montgomery, Madrid Niraj continues: It’s complicated. Countries set their own rules, but there is coordination: A United Nations aviation agency and a voluntary outside group help them align on broad principles and safety frameworks. Industry groups lobby for consistency, too, and European rules are similar to American ones. Many countries require you to take a test to ensure you understand the rules. Warfare How big are drones used in warfare, and what weapons do they carry? How far can they fly? | Jeff Wilson, Hanson, Mass. Lara Jakes, who covers weapons and conflict, writes: Military drones can be as big as a small commercial airplane or as tiny as a mosquito. Most fall somewhere in between. Some drones that carry missiles and bombs (which can weigh several hundred pounds) are as long as a school bus. Their range depends on the model, generally between several hundred and several thousand miles. Russia and Ukraine make kamikaze drones that bomb their targets. Some have 12-foot wingspans and fly several hundred miles; others are the size of a dinner plate and make 25-mile trips for close combat. And remotely-controlled boats and uncrewed ground vehicles are also considered drones. How are military drones different from consumer drones? | Sara Parks, Richmond, Va. Greg Jaffe, who covers the military, writes: They’re not really different. That opens opportunities for companies that aren’t big defense manufacturers. It also creates problems for the Pentagon: Many of the components used in drones, such as brushless motors, are made primarily in China. The biggest difference is that the military loads its drones with sensors that can spot things like heat signatures or technology that keeps the drones aloft when the enemy tries to jam their signals. The big leap will be using A.I. technology so that one person can pilot a swarm of drones. The artificial intelligence will identify potential targets and a human will then sign off on the final attack. Are there any international treaties or standards that limit the placement of weapons on drones? Are efforts underway to negotiate such limits? | Andy Fleischmann, West Hartford, Conn. Greg continues: They haven’t been negotiated yet. Drones are the future of armed conflict, and Pentagon officials say the way they’ve changed warfare is similar to the way tanks did in World War I — which was profound and hard to predict. The real question is whether nations try to regulate drones that use A.I. to identify targets. Will we let drones kill without a human first verifying the target? Right now that appears to be a red line for the U.S. military. But there could be real pressure to loosen those restrictions if potential adversaries, like China, take a more aggressive approach. Why are military drones so difficult to shoot down? | Richard Lea, Baton Rouge, La. Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a former Marine who covers gun culture and policy, writes: Big military drones, such as those used during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are relatively easy to shoot with surface-to-air missiles, because they’re large and slow. The smaller civilian devices adapted for warfare can be the size of birds. Their speed, shape and sheer numbers make them difficult to track. With these drones, electronic jamming is the first line of defense. Then fortifications, such as nets and bunkers, act as barricades from their explosives. (See how tanks in Ukraine have adapted to this problem.) Small arms, such as shotguns, are often the last resort. THE LATEST NEWS Sri Lanka In Sri Lanka. Eranga Jayawardena/Associated Press After a cyclone flooded Sri Lanka, its president declared it the largest and most challenging natural disaster in the island’s history. Over a million people are affected as entire towns remain under water. Officials said they feared the death toll would rise significantly. Middle East Pope Leo encouraged the Turkish president to help Israel and the Palestinian territories work toward a two-state solution. Israel’s military dominance in the Middle East may be making peace more elusive, Roger Cohen writes. More International News In the presidential election in Honduras, two conservative candidates were virtually tied, a preliminary sample of votes showed. Trump endorsed one of the candidates, a former mayor. After a devastating hurricane, Jamaican hotel owners are rushing to reopen in time for the winter tourist season. Business Chinese fried chicken in Queens. Ava Pellor for The New York Times Some Chinese food and beverage chains are expanding into the U.S., and customers in New York and Los Angeles are standing in line for milk tea and fried chicken sandwiches. Many British small businesses still want access to the American market despite tariffs, and they are willing to make sacrifices for it. As pizza prices continue to rise, Americans are buying smaller pies with fewer toppings. Other Big Stories After a strike on a boat in the Caribbean, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered a follow-up strike to kill survivors, The Washington Post reported. Lawmakers from both parties said that could be a war crime. Oxford’s 2025 word of the year is “rage bait,” defined as online content meant to elicit anger. It beat out “biohack” and “aura farming.” FACE TIME Aerlice LeBlanc Madeline Cass for The New York Times When big companies like Amazon and JPMorgan announced earlier this year that they expected employees to work five days a week from the office, many younger workers bridled. They’d begun their careers working from home during the pandemic and didn’t love expensive urban real estate or crowded commutes. But new economic research shows that Gen Z is beginning to see the value of face time. Young employees who work remotely get less training and fewer chances to advance than those who come in person. In response to a Times questionnaire, those under 30 cited better mentoring and more chances for promotion as reasons to come to the office. “I got the sense there were conversations happening at work, about work things, that I wasn’t part of because I wasn’t physically there,” Aerlice LeBlanc, an IT analyst, told The Times. OPINIONS The Democratic Party was wrong to support Israel throughout its relentless assault on Gaza. Voters understand that — and want their leaders to as well, writes Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration. It’s OK to end a good marriage. It’s better to face the truth that wedlock no longer feels right than to wreck the relationship for good, Cathi Hanauer writes. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS At Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. Vincent Alban/The New York Times Winter wonderland: Take a tour of New York City’s holiday window displays. Sci-fi sounds: Learn more about the theremin, an instrument that is played by manipulating electromagnetic fields. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked story yesterday was about the popularity of the quarter-zip sweater. Metropolitan Diary: Truce of the Brooklyn dogs. “Country noir” novelist: Daniel Woodrell, the author of “Winter’s Bone,” wrote about violence and poverty in rural America. He died at 72. TODAY’S NUMBER A monk seal. Loren Elliott for The New York Times Two — That’s the number of wild Hawaiian monk seals, an endangered species, that have become the first of their kind to receive vaccines for bird flu. It’s part of a new effort to protect the animals from the virus, which has been killing marine mammals. SPORTS College football: L.S.U. hired Lane Kiffin as head coach, taking him away from Ole Miss, on a wild day of hirings and firings. There were coaching changes at Auburn, Florida, Michigan State and Kentucky. N.F.L.: The Panthers shocked the Rams, the Bills dominated the Steelers and the Seahawks stifled the Vikings in Week 13 action. Read a recap. COOKIE WEEK BEGINS Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgpeth. It’s here: Cookie Week. Every December, this roundup of recipes marks the start of the holiday baking season. Up first, we have Vaughn Vreeland’s popcorn bucket cookies. They take all the fun of your favorite concession-stand snacks and bake them into a simple sugar dough. Toffee bits feature in a supporting role. A tip: If using gummy candy, be sure to save them for the top; otherwise, the cookies will spread too much as they bake. We’ll have more cookies this week — stay tuned! AMERICA’S BEST STORES M.L. Leddy’s in Fort Worth, Texas. Where is the best place to shop for clothes? Travelers, longing for a souvenir from a trip, often wonder this — and struggle to find an answer. But even locals can have a hard time discerning where to go. So our colleagues have compiled a list of the 50 best clothing stores in America. These are stores that can transport you “to a different world, if only for 10 minutes,” Steven Kurutz, a culture reporter, writes. “A great store will make you think about who you are — and may change that perspective in real time.” You can see the list here. More on culture The animated film “Zootopia 2” dominated the Thanksgiving weekend box office, giving a boost to the industry after a disappointing summer and fall. Mandy Patinkin returns to TV in the new series “The Artist,” a historical drama about murder and money in the early 20th century. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Try Strava to track your workouts. A writer says the app is one social media platform that doesn’t allow you to lie about your accomplishments. Improve your travel day with these noise-canceling headphones. Impress your guests with these beautiful steak knives. Take our news quiz — a special edition on the year in food news. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were couching, coughing and hiccoughing. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. Sam Sifton will be back tomorrow. See you then. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 4, 2025 Author Members Posted December 4, 2025 December 2, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning from New York City. Across southern Asia, typhoons and seasonal monsoon rains have produced severe flooding, killing at least 1,350 people. In Moscow, President Trump’s envoy is scheduled to meet with Vladimir Putin to talk about a peace proposal. And children who have a smartphone by age 12 are at higher risk of depression and obesity, according to a new study. We’ll get to the rest of the news below, including an interview with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The Times. But before we do, I’d like to look at Trump’s recent pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández — a former president of Honduras who was convicted in the United States of a vast drug-trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions. It helps explain Trump’s novel use of his clemency powers. President Trump Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times Pardon power It is difficult to sketch a philosophy of Trump’s use of presidential pardon power. As my colleague Tyler Pager told me yesterday afternoon, most administrations come up with a process for these things. “With Trump, it often comes down to winning him over — or at least his family or closest advisers.” he said. “And because there are many ways to get in his good graces — donating to his political committees, helping fund the construction of the White House ballroom, having one of his friends vouch for you — there is a cottage industry of lawyers and lobbyists seeking to exploit those avenues.” And so Trump has given clemency to political supporters like Michael Grimm and George Santos, two New York Republicans who pleaded guilty to financial crimes. He has pardoned lawyers who advised him on his 2020 campaign and tried to reverse the results of that election. He has pardoned donors and even the child of a donor, commuting the sentence of Paul Walczak, a tax-evading owner of nursing homes, after Walczak’s mother raised millions for Trump. Changpeng Zhao, NBA YoungBoy, Paul Walczak and Michael Grimm. Grant Hindsley for The New York Times, Graham Dickie for The New York Times, Bill Ingram/Imagn Images, Seth Wenig/AP He has pardoned stars of reality television who defrauded banks of millions of dollars; the hip-hop artist NBA YoungBoy, who possessed a gun despite a felony conviction; and two commercial divers from Florida who freed sharks hooked by fishermen. (They said they were rescuing the sharks from an illegal poaching operation. The jury didn’t buy it.) And he has pardoned those who benefited his family, such as Changpeng Zhao, who let his crypto platform be used for child sex abuse, drug trafficking and terrorism. (You could file that under Enemies of My Enemies as well. Joe Biden’s team convicted Zhao as it sought to limit the illicit uses of cryptofinance. When Trump issued his pardon, the White House press secretary said, “The Biden administration’s war on crypto is over.”) A kingpin Some of those decisions track with Trump’s larger political aims — to oppose strict gun measures or aggressive I.R.S. enforcement, for instance. But the pardon over the weekend for Honduras’s former president exposes a contradiction, Tyler said. Juan Orlando Hernández Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Since late August, the United States has built up a military presence in the Caribbean, it says, to battle drug cartels in the region. It has rained ordnance down on more than 20 boats it says are smuggling drugs there, killing more than 80 people. It calls Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, a cartel boss. (The administration says it is engaged in formal armed conflict with the cartels. Members of Congress from both parties are skeptical.) On Saturday, Trump declared the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” And then, on Friday afternoon, “a Full and Complete Pardon” for Hernández. The juxtaposition, Tyler wrote the other day, “displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken ‘cocaine-fueled bribes’ from cartels and ‘protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state.’” I asked Tyler about that yesterday. What’s remarkable about the pardon, he told me, is how directly it appears to contradict one of the main goals of the administration. Related: Trump said the U.S. would “not be throwing good money” at Honduras if his favored candidate didn’t win an election there. THE LATEST NEWS International In Indonesia. Binsar Bakkara/Associated Press Sri Lanka and Indonesia are experiencing the worst of flooding in the region, with millions of people affected. Climate change has made the monsoon season worse. See photos from the region. Trump’s negotiator Steve Witkoff is expected to meet with Putin today in Moscow and present Putin with a peace proposal that American and Ukrainian officials recently discussed. El Chapo’s son pleaded guilty to charges that included the abduction of his father’s former cartel partner. Britain agreed to pay more for drugs, after Trump complained that wealthy countries paid too little for them. Hong Kong officials said contractors at the apartment complex where a fire killed more than 150 people had blanketed buildings with substandard scaffold netting and then tried to hide it from inspectors. In Hong Kong. Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times Boat Strikes The Trump administration defended the legality of a Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean as calls grew in Congress to examine whether a follow-up missile strike to kill survivors amounted to a war crime. Officials said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered a lethal attack but did not specifically order a follow-up attack to kill survivors. More on Politics Alina Habba Kenny Holston/The New York Times A federal judge said the U.S. attorney Trump appointed for New Jersey, Alina Habba, was in the job unlawfully. Her case could reach the Supreme Court. There’s a special election today to fill a vacant House seat in Tennessee. New rules unveiled since an Afghan national was accused of shooting two National Guard members have radically changed immigration policy. They could upend the status of as many as 1.5 million migrants with pending asylum cases in the country. The Trump administration revoked the accreditation of thousands of training centers for truck drivers as it tries to limit noncitizens in the trucking industry. MEET JOE KAHN Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The Times, leads our newsroom of more than 2,000 journalists. We recently asked readers for questions about his work and our coverage. Patrick Healy, an assistant managing editor, put them to Joe. Here are some excerpts from their chat. Patrick: Joe, most of our reader questions were about President Trump. Some readers want us to call the president a fascist; others want us to portray him as a patriot. There’s a desire out there for us to referee the news. How do you navigate all of that? Joe: Readers already have access to a vast amount of opinion and commentary on the internet that can validate their worldviews. That’s not our role. Our approach is to report deeply and thoroughly, surface facts and a range of perspectives on the news, help people understand the world and deliver accountability journalism on issues of public concern. Sometimes that means presenting people with information and ideas that challenge their own preconceptions and beliefs. We regularly scrutinize Trump’s questionable assertions of power and his disregard for democratic or legal norms. That kind of reporting is a more important service than applying labels. Some readers feel that our coverage is biased toward Israel. Others see it as pro-Palestinian. Some critics say we’re mouthpieces for Hamas. Others appreciate our reporting. How do you think about those conflicting reactions? The core principles of our journalists in the region, like any other, are reporting widely, covering the news, putting events in context and doing in-depth investigative work for a broad and diverse global audience. Good news reporting isn’t aimed at either pleasing or displeasing partisans. Our focus is on producing journalism that matters to understanding a divisive, complicated story more fully, regardless of a reader’s personal point of view. We do come under intense scrutiny and often are accused of having a bias in favor of one side or another in that conflict. Some critics tend to assume that if we’re not clearly on their side, we must be on the other side. But when passions run high, producing an authoritative account of the facts, relevant to the broadest possible audience, has even greater value. What keeps you up at night? The most challenging part of the job is producing an independent news report when some readers really want a more partisan one. We’re committed to independent journalism, unencumbered by ties to political parties, government, corporations or private interests, at a time when partisanship seems more intense than ever. Our readers of course have their own beliefs and loyalties, and some want to see more coverage that aligns with their views. To practice independent journalism, you need a thick skin. Read the whole exchange here. OPINIONS Today is Giving Tuesday, an annual celebration of charitable giving. To mark the day, the Opinion section has put together this guide. The Times’s Community Fund, a charity that distributes 100 percent of donations, is back. This year, it’s focused on education, the editorial board writes. Nicholas Kristof is giving to charities in Africa and Asia. Lydia Polgreen is donating cash directly to those in need. David French asks you support a Chicago ministry that provides care for immigrants. Frank Bruni is giving to an organization that trains assistance dogs for disabled people. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Peter Fisher for The New York Times ‘A race against time’: Much of the nation’s musical legacy has been recorded on magnetic tape, which was used regularly from the 1940s into the digital age. But as those analog strips age, they grow fragile. Now one audio engineer, using unconventional machinery, is trying to save as much as he can. Your pick: The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was about the 50 best clothing stores in the U.S. A preacher: Reginald T. Jackson, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, used his church’s political power to encourage voting and promote civil rights. He died at 71. TODAY’S NUMBER 120 — That’s the weight, in pounds, of this year’s official White House gingerbread house. SPORTS Softball: Maya Brady, the niece of Tom Brady, was chosen first in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League draft on Monday. She will join the Oklahoma City Spark for the league’s second season in 2026. College football: The 25-year-old rapper Nau’Jour Grainger, who goes by the stage name Toosii, has committed to play football at Syracuse. RECIPE OF THE DAY Christopher Testani for The New York Times Here’s a recipe for a sausage rice casserole to make this evening and feast on for the rest of the week. It calls for country-style pork sausage. That’s breakfast sausage for many of us. Fried, then cooked with celery, bell pepper and onion before mixing with spices, rice and chicken stock, the sausage adds a silky gloss to the rice. The dish evokes last week’s Thanksgiving stuffings, but it’s more substantial, more delicate, more fragrant, more awesome. Please do not stint on the nutmeg. It’s the secret ingredient! THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR The New York Times The New York Times Book Review has unveiled its 10 best books of 2025. The list is the product of a full year of reading and what you might call vigorous discussion among the Book Review editors. (You can hear them chop it up about all the nominees on the latest episode of the “Book Review” podcast.) Take a look at the list. Which have you read? Which do you want to read? To accompany the list, our critic A.O. Scott went deep on one of the fiction winners, with a very close read of a single long paragraph in “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai. In bringing the paragraph alive, he helps us understand not just the dazzling excellence of Desai’s prose about the star-crossed lovers of the title, but its purpose. “The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true,” A.O. writes, “and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.” Click the video below to see my colleagues talk about the list. The New York Times More on culture A memoir by the journalist Olivia Nuzzi, “American Canto,” is out today, as a scandal over her alleged romantic entanglements with politicians she covered, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., plays out in the press. The book is, in the words of our critic Alexandra Jacobs, “chapterless and scattershot,” “an attempted letter from Trump’s America in the style of a would-be Joan Didion (on Adderall rather than Elavil).” Not a rave. Here’s a saga for you: Sean Combs, formerly known as Diddy, asked a videographer to capture his final days before he was arrested on sex trafficking charges. In a twist, that footage has ended up in the hands of a team run by his longtime rival, 50 Cent — and is in a four-part series scheduled to drop on Netflix today. Combs’s lawyers are demanding Netflix cancel the release. “In the beginning were the Bible movies,” our critic Alissa Wilkinson writes. “As with films in any genre, their popularity has ebbed and flowed, but right now, it’s a flood.” To understand why, she argues, it helps to look at Hollywood history. The film industry has been telling us Bible stories since the start. Late night hosts defended Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor Trump criticized online for welcoming immigrants. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS New York Times Cooking Chop, bake and grill your way through the 14 best cookbooks of the year, chosen by my colleagues on New York Times Cooking. Embrace the holiday season and stream “Candy Cane Lane,” starring Eddie Murphy as a laid-off suburban family man whose obsession with winning the neighborhood’s lights and display contest leads him to strike a deal with a malevolent elf. It’s on Amazon Prime. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was downlink. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 5, 2025 Author Members Posted December 5, 2025 December 3, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. President Trump has escalated his attacks on immigrants, calling Somalis “garbage” in an unapologetically bigoted tirade. The U.S. also paused immigration applications from some countries. We’ll get to that and more below. But before we do, I’d like to draw your attention to Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro is trying to avoid the long arm of the United States. President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times Fast dancing In response to threats from the Trump administration, Maduro has tightened his security, my colleague Anatoly Kurmanaev reports. He hopes to escape a precision strike or a special-forces raid. He changes where he sleeps and what cellphones he uses. He has expanded the use of Cuban bodyguards in his personal security detail because he believes they are more loyal and less likely to betray him. He has also attached more Cuban counterintelligence officers to Venezuela’s military, according to multiple people close to the Venezuelan government. (They asked Anatoly not to use their names because they were worried about Maduro’s reprisals.) At the same time, Maduro has put on a public display of nonchalance in Venezuela, addressing the public frequently (if often in recordings), showing up at public events (if often unannounced), dancing and posting propaganda clips on TikTok. “It’s comfort for his supporters,” Anatoly told me on the phone yesterday, “and defiance to his opponents. He’s a good dancer.” The Trump administration says that Maduro is running a “narcoterrorist” cartel that is flooding the United States with drugs. But Venezuela does not produce fentanyl, which is responsible for two-thirds of American overdose deaths. And the cocaine that moves through his country likely accounts for less than 10 percent of the total that enters the United States. What the administration is looking for, current and former officials in Washington say, is regime change. To hasten it, Trump has moved warships and troops into the region, while also indicating that he might be open to a diplomatic solution. He and Maduro spoke by phone last month to talk about a possible meeting. (There are no current plans for a meeting, people with knowledge of the phone call told The Times.) On Monday, Anatoly reported, Maduro made a surprise appearance at a government rally in Caracas, the nation’s capital. “Party for as long as the body can bear it!” he told the crowd, before dancing to a fast electronic beat. A loop of his voice echoed over the speakers: “No war; peace.” There was a sniper standing guard nearby. ‘Street politics’ Maduro has been in this position before. Trump tried to unseat him during his first administration, calling for a “maximum pressure” campaign that appealed to Latino voters in Florida, a crucial state for Trump at the time. He imposed sanctions on Venezuela and recognized an opposition politician as the nation’s president. It was to no avail. “Maduro wasn’t born yesterday,” Anatoly told me. “He’s been in power for 12 years. He’s survived his fair share of uprisings and coup plots. His message is, I’m here. I’m not scared. I’m running this place.” Andrés Izarra, a minister under Maduro who has broken with the government and gone into exile, put it more bluntly. “He is a compulsive political operator,” he told Anatoly. “He plays by the rough rules of street politics, of corrupt union politics, rules that are similar to those of a mafia.” All of which leaves Venezuela in a precarious position. The economy there is hurting. Close to eight million people have fled the country since Maduro took office, more than a quarter of the population. He is deeply unpopular, with an approval rating that hovers around 20 percent. But many better-off Venezuelans who have stayed are anxious. They worry that dumping Maduro is a risk. “They prefer the predictable chaos of Maduro to the unpredictable chaos of the opposition,” Anatoly said. Yet they recognize that the country’s best chance may be a better relationship with the United States, the country’s cultural and financial north star. Anatoly quoted Porfirio Díaz then, the Mexican dictator who was toppled in 1911: Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States. The aphorism applies to Venezuela, and to its citizens, he said. “They have to live with the United States,” he continued. “They just want to survive this round of pressure.” Read about how Maduro is hanging on. IMMIGRATION CURBS Federal prosecutors charged an Afghan national with murder yesterday in the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., one of whom died. Trump says that the attack is evidence immigrants are dangerous — and that it justifies a maximalist version of his anti-immigrant agenda. In response to the shooting, his administration has: Stopped processing green card and citizenship paperwork for immigrants from any of the countries under Trump’s travel ban, mostly in the Middle East and Africa. Paused all asylum decisions until it could “ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible,” an official said. (The shooting suspect obtained asylum in April, while Trump was president.) Trump also recently threatened in a social media post to deport foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization.” Ordered ICE to start arresting and deporting Afghans who have court orders seeking their removal. A new target A Somali-American community in Minneapolis. Ben Brewer for The New York Times He has also escalated his rhetoric. Although the suspect in Washington is Afghan, he has fixated on another group since the shooting: Somali immigrants. Yesterday, Trump called them “garbage” that he doesn’t want in the country. It was an outburst that was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry, even compared to other statements he has made in his long history of insulting people from African countries. Trump continued his tirade, saying Somalis “do nothing but bitch,” and Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement. He directed ICE agents to target Somali immigrants in Minnesota. THE LATEST NEWS Boat Strikes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a follow-up strike that killed men clinging to boat wreckage in the Caribbean was “the right call.” Hegseth, who watched the initial operation on video, said that he had not seen the men in the water. The admiral who ordered the second strike will face questions from Congress. More on Politics Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, met with Vladimir Putin in Moscow for nearly five hours to discuss the end of the war in Ukraine. They did not reach any compromises. In Tennessee, Matt Van Epps, a Republican, won a special election for the House of Representatives after national Republican groups spent millions to boost his campaign. The Pentagon is test-driving a new press corps composed of pro-Trump commentators and outlets after barring traditional journalists who refused to sign on to its rules. Business The Trump administration wants its “no taxes on tips” rule to exclude money made from pornographic activity. It may soon fall to the I.R.S. to decide what constitutes porn. The Times’s DealBook Summit is today. Follow along to hear from Mr. Beast, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Erika Kirk and many others. Sign up for the DealBook newsletter. Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of business headlines — and the power brokers who shape them. Get it in your inbox Philanthropy Elon Musk’s charity, the Musk Foundation, controls billions of dollars. Yet it failed to give away the minimum required by law, and most of its giving went to charities closely tied to Musk, a Times investigation found. The tech billionaires Michael and Susan Dell plan to give $250 dollars each to 25 million children across the U.S. The money will go into so-called Trump accounts, a type of investment account for children. Read how those work. International Hong Kong authorities have arrested at least two people for demanding more government accountability after a deadly fire. The Indian government ordered smartphone makers to install a tracking app on all new phones. Officials say it will prevent crime; critics say it’s a tool for mass surveillance. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is seeking a pardon in his corruption trial, is borrowing from Trump’s playbook, David Halbfinger writes. Other Big Stories In a testimony in a Manhattan court, an officer told the story of arresting Luigi Mangione in New Jersey. The University of Alabama suspended two student magazines that focus on women and Black students, saying they violated guidance from the Justice Department on D.E.I. JOIN THE FIGHT The New York Times Early in the war with Russia, Ukraine cast military service as a way to defend civilization. But as war fatigue set in and recruitment suffered, the army began depicting service as just another career path. See how Ukraine’s war recruitment ads have changed. OPINIONS Americans should treat the Epstein files with skepticism, considering that Trump’s politicized Justice Department is in charge of redacting them, the editorial board writes. Millennial women are loving Lily Allen’s album “West End Girl” because they’re starting to face their own midlife crises, Lizzy Goodman writes. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Illustration and animation by David Silverman. The Simpsons™ and © 2025 20th Television The greatest generation: That’s Gen X, not so obvs. Amanda Fortini, one of its members, tackled the question for T Magazine: “How did a generation that gets stereotyped as slackers turn out to be a far more important group of artists than they were initially given credit for?” Take a chill pill. It’s true. Think of Nas rapping in “N.Y. State of Mind” about growing up in the Queensbridge housing projects. Amanda quotes the scholar Marc Lamont Hill: The lyrics are as clear and lyrical a depiction “as a Gordon Parks photograph or a Langston Hughes poem.” Report card: A student at the University of Oklahoma cited the Bible in an essay for her psychology class and wrote that the “lie that there are multiple genders” is “demonic.” Her professor gave that work a grade of zero. The student filed a claim of religious discrimination. The university conducted a formal grade appeal, which “resulted in steps to ensure no academic harm to the student from the graded assignment,” according to the school. The instructor has been placed on administrative leave. Sydney beaches: Australia uses shark nets in the ocean to keep them away from swimmers. But do they work? Iran-contra affair: Eugene Hasenfus was thrust into the national spotlight when, on a covert mission sponsored by the C.I.A., his gunrunning cargo plane was shot down over Nicaragua, setting off what would become known as the Iran-contra affair. He died at 84, TODAY’S NUMBER 1,120 — That is about the number of crews the Ohio Department of Transportation had on state roads yesterday, working to improve driving conditions as a major winter storm dumped snow and ice across the Midwest. SPORTS Tennis: Serena Williams took a step toward returning to tennis by re-entering the sport’s anti-doping testing pool. But she insists she’s not coming back. N.F.L.: The former Jets wide receiver Laveranues Coles made $42 million in football. Fifteen years after retirement, he will soon become a police officer in his hometown of Jacksonville, Fla. RECIPE OF THE DAY Ryan Liebe for The New York Times Here it is, Cooking’s most popular recipe of 2025: Zaynab Issa’s smashed beef kebab with cucumber yogurt. It’s a lovely midweek meal that wears its Persian heritage proudly, with warmly spiced, seared ground beef served over the creamy coolness of the sauce. After you’ve cooked the meat, toast walnuts and raisins in the leftover fat in the pan to add crunch and sweetness. Serve with warm pita or steamed rice. Oh, man. See the 25 most popular recipes of the year. THE BEST MOVIES OF 2025 Warner Bros. TIFF; Neon, via Associated Press Our critics Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson picked their personal top 10s from cinema’s past 12 months. The choices are reminders, Manohla says, “that what matters to us moviegoers isn’t the industry’s bottom line but the art.” Explore their favorite movies of the year. More on culture 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Take some time today to focus on “The Two Fridas” by Frida Kahlo. A 10-minute investment will pay dividends, I promise. Can a celebrity be a conservative? In Trump’s America the answer is yes and no. The “Popcast" team reached out to the Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat to talk about that, and about what a right-wing-coded alternative to the Super Bowl halftime show might look like. Have a listen. Late night hosts joked about Trump on social media. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Try a shoe that resembles a potato. Really. Get your Birks on. Jacob Gallagher, who covers men’s style for The Times, says the comfortable shape is having a moment. Consider a trip to Paris. Our Travel team put together un sacré guide de poche, a great pocket guide, for the City of Light. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was chalked. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 6, 2025 Author Members Posted December 6, 2025 December 4, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. Washington is still talking about the follow-up boat strike in the Caribbean. My colleagues have uncovered more details about the plans the military has in place to handle survivors. And the Trump administration has gutted a Biden-era climate policy meant to promote electric cars. He’s pushing the industry back toward gasoline. I’d like to start today, though, in Phoenix, where many Afghans are wondering whether they will face deportation after the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., an attack the authorities say was carried out by a 29-year-old Afghan man. The administration wants more vetting. Now the migrants are anxious and afraid. Mirwais Daudzai Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times Collective blame Mirwais Daudzai, a 31-year-old Afghan refugee, is one example. For the past two years he’s worked at the Phoenix airport, writes Miriam Jordan, an immigration reporter. If you’re a traveler who needs a wheelchair, he’s the guy who helps you at the start or end of your journey, who gets you onto the plane or down to baggage claim. When travelers learn Daudzai fled to the United States from his native Afghanistan, many tell him they are glad he is safe here. Some slide him a tip. That changed after the attack in Washington, during which officials said an Afghan national used a .357 revolver to shoot two members of the West Virginia National Guard, killing one of them. Daudzai experiences hostility now, he told Miriam, the first he’s encountered since coming to the United States. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, one passenger pulled back a $20 bill when she learned Daudzai was from Afghanistan. “Before this problem, I’m so happy and relaxed in this country,” he said. “I have a job, I’m safe, I have no enemies.” Which may well be true. Daudzai and his wife both have green card applications. But President Trump has told his administration to suspend all Afghan immigration cases and has said the administration will “re-examine every single” Afghan who came to the United States during the Biden presidency. He said last week that “many of these people are criminals, many of these people are people that shouldn’t be here.” Now his administration will deport anyone “who does not belong here or add benefit to our country.” “People are looking at all Afghans as terrorists,” Daudzai told Miriam. ‘Fear is following us’ What a thing that must be to experience. You’re a member of a group — a nationality, a race, a political party, a denomination — and another member of that group does a terrible, heinous thing. You’ve been building a life, or living a life, one that is stable and productive. Then suddenly you find yourself painted with the same tar, and wearing the same feathers, as the person who is suspected of doing the appalling thing. As part of her reporting, Miriam joined a group of Afghans at the Arizona Refugee Center, a nonprofit organization in Mesa, outside Phoenix. There she met Obaidullah Durani. He’s a former Afghan fighter pilot trained by the United States. He was with his two young children. During the evacuation of Kabul in 2021, his youngest was one of several infants lifted over a fence by Marines during the desperate rush to board military planes. Durani’s wife was separated from them in the chaos. She remains in Afghanistan, waiting for approval to join her family. In Phoenix, Durani and his children are scheduled for a green card interview this month. Durani had come to the center to ask if that interview was still going to happen. If it did happen, he wanted to know, could the family be detained? Could they be deported? Obaidullah Durani with his children in Arizona. Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times Durani is but one of about 200,000 Afghans who were once considered wartime allies of the United States and admitted to the country after Kabul’s fall. Many underwent extensive vetting before being welcomed here, American officials told The Times. They were resettled in communities across the nation, including Phoenix. There they set out to build new lives. Another man Miriam encountered at the center was Hekmatullah, who asked that he be identified only by his given name to protect relatives back in Afghanistan. He too works at the airport, and he too is scared about the escalated immigration crackdown that has followed last month’s shooting. His children are thriving. They speak perfect English. What will happen to their asylum case? Hekmatullah spoke about Afghanistan, and his family’s uncertain future. “We left because of fear,” he told Miriam. “Now fear is following us.” Read about how the attack is rippling through Afghan communities. Related: The suspect showed signs of erratic behavior for about two years, according to someone who worked with his family. Here’s what we know about his life. THE LATEST NEWS Boat Strikes The military had outlined plans for handling survivors of boat strikes, officials said. It would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the U.S. deemed to be “a hostile action,” like contacting cartel members. There were two survivors after the first boat strike on Sept. 2, and one of them radioed for help, officials said. The military admiral who ordered the follow-up strike on Sept. 2 is set to meet with members of Congress today. Are these boat strikes legal at all? Click the video below to see our colleague David Sanger answer that question. More on the Pentagon In a report, a Pentagon investigator concluded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked endangering U.S. troops when he discussed plans to attack Yemen in a Signal group chat. The Times sued the Pentagon over new guidelines that restrict journalists’ access to military sources. Immigration Federal agents began an immigration enforcement operation in New Orleans, the latest front in the Trump administration’s crackdown. Somalia’s leader said it was “better not to respond” a day after Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage.” Fraud has swamped Minnesota’s social services. Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora are largely responsible. Trump has highlighted the case in his recent rants against immigrants. More on Politics Trump pardoned Henry Cuellar, a Democratic lawmaker from Texas who is awaiting trial on bribery charges. The president called the case politically motivated because Cuellar had spoken out against Biden-era border policies. Trump has renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself. He previously fired most of its employees. Israel Israel said it would reopen a Gaza border crossing, but only for Palestinians to leave. At The Times’s DealBook Summit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would not hesitate to visit New York City, despite a pledge by Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect, to honor an arrest warrant for him. Sign up for the DealBook newsletter. Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of business headlines — and the power brokers who shape them. Get it in your inbox More International News Vladimir Putin is expected to arrive in India today for an annual bilateral summit. U.S. demands for India to limit its economic ties with Russia loom over the meetings. Hong Kong residents demanded accountability for last week’s devastating apartment complex fire. Instead, officials are following the Beijing playbook of quashing dissent, Li Yuan writes. Other Big Stories A dental suite in Jeffrey Epstein’s home on his private island. House Oversight Committee Democrats, via Reuters House Democrats released another collection of files from their investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. This time, it’s pictures and videos from his private island. Private employers cut jobs in November, the third decline in four months. It’s the latest sign that the labor market slowdown may be getting more serious. Bitcoin has plunged more than 30 percent in recent months. A doctor who illegally supplied Matthew Perry with ketamine in the weeks leading up to the “Friends” actor’s death was sentenced to 30 months in prison. A.I. COLLEGE DEGREES Rune Fisker Move over, computer science. You can now major in artificial intelligence. At M.I.T., a new program called “artificial intelligence and decision-making” has become the second most popular major. At the University of California, San Diego, 150 first-year students signed up for a new A.I. program. The State University of New York at Buffalo has created a stand-alone “department of A.I. and society.” More than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of A.I. and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida. As people adopt A.I. — and as companies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into its development — more young people want to understand the tech, score jobs in the industry and even build it themselves. Schools are eager to meet the new demand. OPINIONS The popularity of the “free birth” movement, in which women give birth without medical assistance, threatens public health, Jessica Grose writes. Here is a column by M. Gessen on the importance of community media, and why it deserves support. Gessen specifically recommends donating to Jewish Currents, which “has offered bracing coverage of the war in Gaza and of settler violence in the West Bank.” Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Coffee shops in San Francisco and Seoul. Sources: SF OpenData; Google Maps; Korea Local Information Research & Development Institute. Pablo Robles/The New York Times Coffee shop problem: There are a lot of coffee shops in South Korea. The number of them has doubled nationwide over the past six years, with 80,000 shops for a population of 51 million. There are more than 10,000 in Seoul alone. They keep opening — and closing. “A cafe is not a place to get rich,” one owner told The Times. “It’s just a place to go and drink coffee.” Spotify Wrapped: Your social feeds are probably inundated with posts about your friends’ listening habits this year. Other companies are following the trend. Closing time: A raccoon walked into a Virginia liquor store, broke bottles and slurped alcohol before passing out drunk on the bathroom floor. See photos. (Don’t worry, the raccoon is OK.) TODAY’S NUMBER 37 million — That is about how many pounds of snails people in France eat every year, a number we learned after 990 pounds of them were stolen from a farm there. SPORTS N.B.A.: Chris Paul wanted to retire after this season, his 21st in the league, but his retirement tour ended abruptly after the Clippers sent him home. M.L.B.: The Dodgers’ manager, Dave Roberts, oversaw a 2025 roster that was the most expensive in baseball history. Now, he’s in favor of a salary cap. RECIPE OF THE DAY Linda Xiao for The New York Times I would not generally be out here recommending a chicken meatball for dinner. Ground chicken dries as quickly as rain-kissed desert sand. But the genius of Ali Slagle’s recipe for chicken-zucchini meatballs with feta is how incredibly moist the vegetable leaves the lean protein. Roast extra zucchini, cut into in coins, alongside the meatballs, and then top everything with a lemony feta sauce, some red pepper flakes and a few handfuls of chopped fresh basil and mint. Would you like that with rice cooked in chicken broth? I would. THE BEST TV SHOWS OF 2025 Clockwise from left: “Severance,” “The Lowdown,” “Asura” and “Dying for Sex.” Apple TV+; FX; Netflix; FX Our television critics James Poniewozik and Mike Hale take stock of the best shows that appeared on our screens this year, including “Severance,” “The Pitt,” “Andor,” “Pluribus,” “The Lowdown” and others. The shows seemed to be in conversation with each other, James writes. “And why not? TV series emerge from the same culture and climate. They breathe in the same air.” Explore the best TV shows of 2025. Related: The Morning’s most read article yesterday was The Times’s ranking of the best movies of 2025. More on culture Michael Ovitz, the former Hollywood power broker, is one of the world’s great collectors of art. Among his holdings: Lichtensteins, a Donald Judd stack, Jasper Johns’s “White Flag,” Rembrandt etchings and a staggering number of Picassos. Our reporter Robin Pogrebin went to Ovitz’s 28,000-square-foot glass and steel home for a guided tour. The visuals are amazing. Stephen Colbert questioned Trump’s strategy in the latest war on drugs. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Stream a new Christmas movie. Stream a whole bunch of them while you’re at it. Read a new biography of the writer Denis Johnson — or at any rate Dwight Garner’s exciting review of it. “By now we know what people mean when they say that something feels or sounds ‘like a Denis Johnson story,’” he writes. “There will be hard times and bad luck and bleak surroundings and beautiful losers, nursing chronic hurts, with a narrow shot at redemption.” Browse the most popular gifts recommended by the wily elves at Wirecutter this year. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was matchup. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter misidentified the state where Luigi Mangione was arrested. It was Pennsylvania, not New Jersey. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 7, 2025 Author Members Posted December 7, 2025 December 5, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. President Trump presided over a Congo-Rwanda peace deal yesterday, as his administration was being questioned about potential war crimes. And in an emergency ruling, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Texas Republicans to use their gerrymandered map for the midterm elections. We have more news below. Let’s start, though, by talking about the best stuff we experienced this year. A screen showing Spotify Wrapped in London. John Phillips/Getty Images for Spotify Take your best The lists are coming. The lists are here. Spotify and Apple Music pushed out their “wrapped” lists this week, telling users what they listened to most this year. YouTube did something similar yesterday. It can be a shock to see a dispassionate account of how you spent your time. A lot of Big Thief, wow. The Times makes lists, too. Already we’ve published the best books of the year, the best movies, the best TV shows and the best cookbooks. Many, many more are coming — The Morning will have a few of our own. Best albums dropped today: Geese made the cut. So did Effie, Bad Bunny, Morgan Wallen and Rosalía. Debate our critics in the comments. I used to oversee our culture and lifestyle coverage, and I was and remain a big proponent of these catalogs. They’re fun to read and digest and discuss. They’re popular, too. Also, they can be dizzying. Do they help us make decisions, or validate ones we’ve already made? Can we really measure one artist against another, when what they create is so categorically different? Playboi Carti vs. Smerz? Really? (I’ve worked as a critic, too. That’s a fun part of the job.) What is the exercise actually about? Maybe it’s part of our compulsion to tabulate and optimize every part of our lives? I knew the right person to ask. Making a canon Clockwise from top left, Playboi Carti, Rosalía, Bad Bunny and Effie. Graham Dickie for The New York Times; Cristina Quicler/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Erika Santelices/Reuters; Elly Xia The fates were aligned. When I found him in the newsroom yesterday afternoon, Wesley Morris, a critic at large for The Times and host of the “Cannonball” culture podcast, was listening to a playlist of the 885 greatest covers of all time, as chosen by the listeners of WXPN in Philadelphia, his hometown station. He was interrupting a list to talk to me about lists. He laughed, pointing that out. For Wesley, an inventory can be revealing — “a way to have the year explained to me through a list, a story I can have a conversation with, a story that’s yearbookish, a record of what transpired,” he said. The ones made by critics do that and more: show us new music, new books, new art. Sometimes these lists can appear disordered, strange in the aggregate — here is a horror film, a documentary, a hip-hop track, a grief memoir, a Caribbean restaurant. But that, too, tells us about our culture. “You want a mess,” Wesley said. “Because the mess is the truth. These compendiums of artistic feats that accrue over the year? Even if you haven’t experienced them yet yourself, they tell us something about … us.” What’s good You can’t explore new worlds from every list, though. The “wrapped” accounting tells us only about artists we already know — or artists that recommendation algorithms think are similar. “It’s like going to the doctor for a test,” Wesley said, “and this is the result. ‘You eat a lot of peanuts, friend. How about a cashew?’” Wesley prefers the best-of lists created by his colleagues, people who spend their years consuming art for a paycheck. Their work is a rebuke to how the digital entertainment ecosystem operates, he says. What critics can do is tell us about our art, our year, our culture, ourselves. The right list can tell us a story about all that. And it can raise high what’s best — so we can talk about it, so we can experiment and learn. “The algorithm can’t canonize,” Wesley said. “The algorithm doesn’t know what it’s recommending.” ASK THE TIMES Hundreds of deportees detained in a hotel in Panama City in February. Our On Politics newsletter recently asked readers for questions about immigration and invited reporters to answer. Read the chat. Here’s one question: When an immigrant is deported and sent somewhere other than their native country (for example to Uganda rather than El Salvador), what happens to them? — Angela Mack, Branford, Conn. Julie Turkewitz, our Andes bureau chief, writes: A group of about 300 migrants sent to Panama were locked in a hotel in Panama City, then in a jungle-side detention camp, before being freed. Some agreed to return to their home countries, while others were granted temporary legal status in Panama. A group of more than 200 Venezuelan men sent to El Salvador spent four months in a maximum-security prison, where many of them endured abuse that experts said met the definition of torture. In July, the men were sent back to Venezuela. A few of them were detained by the Venezuelan government, which has declined to comment on their whereabouts. In other cases, migrants have also been detained in third countries, like Eswatini, before ultimately being sent home. More immigration news The New York Times In the big cities targeted for ICE crackdowns, most arrested migrants have no criminal record, new data shows. One New Orleans woman described what happened when agents came for the workers fixing her roof. ICE separated a 6-year-old boy from his father during an effort to deport them to China. THE LATEST NEWS Vaccines A vaccine panel appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to decide today whether to change a recommendation that newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine. The vote, originally set for yesterday, has been deferred several times because of disagreements over the underlying science. (Since all newborns began receiving the vaccine in 1991, rates of the disease have fallen.) The Times has been tracing Kennedy’s two-decade quest to dismantle vaccine policy. Boat Strikes Adm. Frank Bradley, the commander of the operation, at the Capitol yesterday. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times Military officers showed lawmakers a video of the Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean, and they defended the follow-up strike that killed two survivors. Reactions to the footage were split along partisan lines. A Democratic lawmaker described it as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service”; a Republican one described it as “exactly what we’d expect our military commanders to do.” Congress is focusing on the two deaths in that strike. But the focus may be obscuring the bigger picture: Nine other people died in that same attack, and the U.S. has killed 87 in all. Politics A grand jury is said to have declined to re-indict Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, rejecting a Trump effort to revive a criminal case. Federal agents arrested a Virginia man they say planted pipe bombs near the Capitol before the Jan. 6 riot in 2021. The arrest follows nearly five years of false investigative leads and conspiracy theories. Republican lawmakers, particularly women, are increasingly frustrated with Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership. Some predict he may not remain speaker for the rest of this term. A bipartisan group of lawmakers released a plan to extend, but scale back, Obamacare subsidies set to expire at the end of the year. Israel Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Slovenia said they were boycotting next year’s Eurovision Song Contest because Israel would participate. Israel authorized 22 settlements in the West Bank in May. Researchers say the move has led to the largest displacement of Palestinians in 50 years. Catholic Church The New York Times Pope Leo XIV has wrapped up the first international trip of his papacy. In the video above, Motoko Rich, our Rome bureau chief, describes covering the new pope up close. Click to watch. After years of debate, the Vatican announced that women shouldn’t become deacons, at least for now. Other Big Stories It’s difficult to build computer-chip factories in America. To do so requires significant expertise from abroad. In Brooklyn, an 11-year-old boy is missing. His mother won’t answer questions about where he is. FARE DODGERS New York City subway turnstiles. Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times New York City’s public transit system lost nearly $1 billion to fare evasion last year, officials say. More than 150 million riders hopped, ducked or dodged subway turnstiles. The state’s transit agency is testing tools to stop the free rides. They include jagged metal partitions and taller turnstiles — as well as a few less obvious changes to how the fare gates work. See the efforts here. OPINIONS China’s former one-child policy has left the country with over 30 million more men than women. Violet Du Feng follows a dating boot camp meant to help Chinese men find love. If an A.I. bubble popped, it would force tech companies to do more with less, Carl Benedikt Frey argues. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Who’s that snake? Gary Goldman is an old Hollywood hand who in 2017 sued Disney for copyright infringement. He said the studio had stolen ideas from him that became the film “Zootopia,” a billion-dollar hit. He lost. Then came “Zootopia 2,” which opened last week. One creature in it is a one-fanged snake named Gary De’Snake, an amiable character with a specific point of view: He has been ripped off. That was unsettling for Goldman. While he told The Times he didn’t have much appetite for another legal action, you never know. De’Snake is very Goldmanish, his friends have told him. “I do have one fang left,” he said. Village people: The two men lived around the corner from each other for almost half a century. But a sidewalk bump led to a shove, the police say. Now one is dead. It’s really December: Two bursts of Arctic air could send temperatures plunging in the central and eastern U.S. TODAY’S NUMBER 70 billion — That’s how many dollars Meta’s Reality Lab, which builds the hardware and software for Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual-reality goals, has lost over the past four years. SPORTS N.B.A.: LeBron James’s historic streak has had double digit points for nearly 1,300 regular-season games. That ended last night. World Cup: The 2026 draw is today. President Trump will speak after receiving the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. RECIPE OF THE DAY Bryan Gardner for The New York Times Picadillo is a dish you’ll find all over Latin America and in the Philippines — chopped beef, usually, simmered with tomatoes, onions, garlic, bell peppers and warm spices. (In the Philippines, there’d be fish sauce, too.) It’s terrific over rice, stuffed into empanadas or folded into tortillas. Now the great Rick Martínez has brought us a vegetarian version, chickpea picadillo, that uses a combination of grated tofu, mushrooms and chickpeas as the protein at its base. Simmer everything with tangy tomatillos, poblano and scallions, and it all comes together into a savory, comforting, ever-so-slightly spicy scramble. Do with that what you wish! COLORWAYS Pantone The 2026 color of the year — at least according to the colorists at Pantone, who have been declaring these hues since 1999 — is Cloud Dancer, officially known as PANTONE 11-4201. That is, basically … white? Reporters on our Styles desk discussed the choice. More on culture “Jay Kelly,” Noah Baumbach’s new movie starring George Clooney as an alternate-universe George Clooney-like character, “has a strange, old-fashioned charm,” writes our critic Alissa Wilkinson. It slips “in and out of registers, seeming to work on multiple levels at once.” Let’s go. Kyle Buchanan, who writes the Projectionist column, kicks off Hollywood’s awards season with a first look at the Oscar race. It’s hard to pick an obvious top 10. Apple has even bought billboards to support its glossy but empty “F1,” thinking it has a chance, Kyle reports. Maybe it does! On late night, Jimmy Kimmel thanked Trump for making him more famous this year. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Conceive of a memory-foam pillow that won’t crick your neck, recommended by the side sleepers at Wirecutter. Stream a new documentary from Amy Berg, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” on HBO Max. Using a trove of rare video, audio and photographs provided by Buckley’s mother, the film tells the story of the singer-songwriter who died in 1997 at age 30 and whose music found wide fame after his death. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was exaltedly. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 8, 2025 Author Members Posted December 8, 2025 December 6, 2025 Good morning. I’m off this week, so my colleague Emily Weinstein is filling in to tell you about the return of NYT Cooking’s holiday cookie extravaganza. —Melissa Kirsch Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgpeth. Sweet season By Emily Weinstein I’m the editor in chief of New York Times Cooking and Food. I’ve always had a sweet tooth; I have memories of stirring heaps of extra powder into my chocolate milk when I was a child, until it was lumpy and stunningly sugary. But my love of desserts didn’t actually extend to making them, even as I got older. I found baking in particular to be a frustrating and messy exercise, and unsatisfying too — after the haphazard measuring and beating, with my counters a crime scene of spilled cocoa powder and splattered egg, the recipe rudely wouldn’t turn out right. (Even back then I understood the problem wasn’t the recipe. It was the baker.) At one point, I told Dorie Greenspan, the cookbook author and queen of home baking, that I found baking to be more difficult than cooking. No, she said, sage and kind, baking is easier than cooking! In baking, you just have to follow the directions. In that spirit — and in honor of Cookie Week, New York Times Cooking’s annual holiday baking spree, with seven new recipes and videos to match — I have some directions and advice for you. Try them and I promise that you’ll be happier in the kitchen. These days, I bake a lot, and I’ve found a kind of bliss in the process, and the same childhood euphoria that comes from that first sweet bite (or in the case of that chocolate milk, the first sweet sip). Read the recipe all the way through before you start baking. I know this is boring, an assignment in English class when you’re ready for recess. Do it so you’re not caught off guard when, for instance, a recipe calls for you to chill the dough for three hours, but the party starts in 20 minutes. Measure and prepare all your ingredients first. This is also a little dull. But once you start moving through the recipe, you’ll find how amazing it is to have everything you need at hand so you can glide through the steps, no pausing to frantically search for the salt. And, if your cookie recipe calls for room temperature butter (many do), take it out of the fridge to soften as soon as you’ve decided to bake. Cookie dough generally freezes well; make extra. Freeze the dough in individual portions if you want to be able to bake a single cookie on a whim. (You can easily double recipes using our new scaling feature. You’ll need to be in the Cooking app on Android or iOS; click on the little icon at the top right of the ingredients list.) It’s better to underbake than to overbake. You can’t unbake a cookie any more than you can unsalt a soup. So take the pan out of the oven when the cookies look just done; they’ll firm up as they cool. (And if you take them out of the oven and they’re still raw, just put them back in for a minute.) Really, follow the directions, especially if you’re making a recipe for the first time. If the recipe says to leave two inches between the cookies on the baking sheet, do it. If it says not to move the baked cookies until they are completely cool, listen. And now, the cookies. Here are three from this year’s delicious batch. Mint chocolate cool Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgpeth. My favorite ice cream flavor, reborn as a cookie. Eric Kim’s recipe is easy to make and has such a fun and striking appearance, with its green angles and chocolate curls. You don’t even need an electric mixer, though it’s helpful to have an offset spatula to spread the melted white chocolate (tinted green with food coloring) that coats the shortbread base. If you don’t have an offset spatula, a regular rubber one or even the back of a spoon works fine. Coffee and spice Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgpeth. Melissa Clark funnels the signature flavors of Vietnamese coffee — espresso and condensed milk — into the hypnotic swirls of a marbled brownie. I learned something new from this recipe, which is that the neatest way to cut brownies once you’ve baked them is to chill them in the pan for at least an hour, flip the whole slab out upside down, and then slice them that way. Ginger, lime and a bit of a buzz Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgpeth. Dan Pelosi’s Dark ’n’ Stormy Cookies have dark rum in the dough and the glaze, inspired as they are by the cocktail made with ginger beer, rum and a bright slash of lime. This is a festive cookie for an excellent party (but maybe not one for the school volleyball team’s bake sale). THE LATEST NEWS In the Courts The Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. A judge ruled last week that Lindsey Halligan, a federal prosecutor appointed by Trump, was in the job illegally. But she has still not left her post. A federal judge in Florida approved the release of grand jury documents from an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein nearly two decades ago. Trump Administration A federal vaccine committee voted to end the longstanding recommendation that all newborns be immunized against hepatitis B. A video of the U.S. military’s Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean shows the survivors waving overhead, according to people who saw it. Some interpreted it as an attempt to surrender. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, awarded Trump with a new peace prize after its leader had publicly lobbied for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Other Big Stories Vanity Fair will not renew its contract with the journalist Olivia Nuzzi, extricating itself from the controversy over her relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The E.U. fined X, Elon Musk’s social media company, $140 million for violating a law that regulates digital content. The New York Times sued Perplexity, an A.I. start-up, claiming that Perplexity repeatedly used its copyrighted work without permission. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Frank Gehry Frank Gehry at his studio in Los Angeles in 2021. Erik Carter for The New York Times Frank Gehry, a titan of architecture who designed some of the world’s most recognizable buildings, died at 96. Many of Gehry’s projects, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, are regarded as masterpieces. See 12 projects that show the scope of his work. Netflix-Warner Bros. Deal Netflix announced it would acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business for $83 billion. The deal, which includes TV and film studios as well as HBO Max (but not CNN), would give Netflix even more leverage over Hollywood — and a greater presence in theatrical releases. Film and TV Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) and Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) in “Zootopia 2.” Disney/Disney, via Associated Press The animated couple from “Zootopia” has its own fandom, some of which hails from the furry community. The love runs deep. The race for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture has five sure bets. What about the other slots? Theater At least six stage productions this year have a homophobic slur in their titles — sometimes to shock or provoke, but also to reclaim the word. Does that make it OK? The authorities in Japan said Jeremy O. Harris, the Tony-nominated playwright and actor, was arrested on suspicion of attempting to smuggle illegal drugs. More Culture Gellért Bath Stephen Hiltner/The New York Times In Budapest, political disputes and aging infrastructure have led to cascading problems at some of the city’s beloved baths. Brasses roared with punitive force; strings attacked notes as if lashing them. The Pittsburgh Symphony, playing at Carnegie Hall, sounds exactly how an orchestra should sound, writes David Allen. A new $40 million exhibit at the National Archives, opening nine months after Trump fired the chief archivist, uses technology to explore the items in its vaults. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. CULTURE CALENDAR ? “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” (Netflix): The third installment in this whodunit series, featuring Daniel Craig’s drawling detective Benoit Blanc, hits the streaming service on Friday. The mystery this time concerns “a very 2025 case” our critic Alissa Wilkinson writes: a murder in a church with a charismatic preacher who has been radicalizing his flock against the evils of modernity. And while the film takes on some big ideas around religion, Alissa writes, it does so with “a remarkably light, affectionately irreverent touch.” Read our review. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini. By Melissa Clark Kharra masala fish (fish with onions and tomatoes) If a fragrant seafood dish seems like just the thing for this cold December weekend, make Zainab Shah’s speedy kharra masala fish. She starts by seasoning tomatoes and onions with whole spices — coriander, cumin, mustard seed and dried chiles. Then she adds fillets of white fish (any kind you like), letting them steam and absorb all the rich flavors. A garnish of fresh ginger, green chiles and cilantro gives it all a pungent freshness. Serve with rice, roti or by itself for a saucy, savory meal. REAL ESTATE Jeff Allyn, left, and David Barenholtz. Philip Cheung for The New York Times The Hunt: A pair of business consultants looked for a low-maintenance place near Palm Springs, Calif., to spend the winters. Which home did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $975,000 in Missouri, Florida and New Mexico: a Tudor Revival near a university; a bungalow in West Palm Beach; and an adobe farmhouse close to art galleries and skiing. Not-so-smart home: A fight over who can control the garage has opened up a wider debate about consumer rights. T MAGAZINE Drawing by Chris Ware Read this weekend’s issue of T, The Times’s style magazine. LIVING Ah, Paris: Visiting the City of Light for the first time and feeling a bit overwhelmed? Our guide will help make sure you hit the highlights and leave time for serendipitous discovery. Life of the party: If you want to have people over for the holidays but don’t want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, try these three-ingredient appetizers. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Limited space? Add some mirrors. Typically, to create spaciousness, we have to take things away: objects, clutter, walls. But adding a mirror is an often-overlooked way to make a space feel bigger. Any of Wirecutter’s favorite mirrors can help facilitate this optical illusion — with some strategic placement, that is. Tight hallway or entryway? Try hanging your mirror on a wall across from a light source so the glow reflects into the rest of the room. Or try two instead of one: Mirrors placed on opposite walls can create a sense of infinity. And consider height. A tall mirror can have the effect of raising your ceilings. — Ivy Elrod GAME OF THE WEEK Indiana’s quarterback, Fernando Mendoza. Doug Mcschooler/Associated Press No. 1 Ohio State vs. No. 2 Indiana, Big Ten championship: Is this the most important college football game of the year? Is it basically pointless? Might it be both? Why it matters: For powerhouse Ohio State, an undefeated season is just another year. For Indiana, it’s once-in-a-lifetime. Before Coach Curt Cignetti arrived and performed something of a college football miracle, Indiana had more losses in its history than any other program. The Hoosiers have never played in a Big Ten championship game, and they haven’t beaten Ohio State since the 1980s. Why it doesn’t: There was a time when this game — between two undefeated, major conference teams — would decide who plays for a national championship. But no longer. These days, college football greatness is determined by a 12-team playoff, and both of these teams are comfortably in that field. The winner today will get a first-round bye. The loser might, too. Tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on Fox NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were ambiance and ambience. 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. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 8, 2025 Author Members Posted December 8, 2025 December 7, 2025 Good morning. Today, Wirecutter helps Morning readers with their trickiest holiday gift searches. Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter The gift of giving By Hannah Morrill I’m a Wirecutter editor focused on gifts. My team rigorously assessed hundreds of gifts this year, including a golden analog nose hair trimmer. I often get texts from long-lost acquaintances around this time of year. Parents of my children’s preschool friends, the sibling of a college boyfriend, a former neighbor — they all suddenly recall my existence (and my number) when they’re in a pickle to find a gift. Here’s the thing: The panicked texts are never really about a gift, or at least not only about a gift. Beneath the surface there’s almost always something more personal — a strained relationship, different income brackets, generational divides — that the gifter hopes to overcome. It’s one of the things I find most beautiful about giving gifts. It can be the ultimate act of relationship hope, a prettily wrapped chance to do better, start anew and express one’s love, acceptance and appreciation. We recently invited readers of The Morning to tell us about the people they’re having trouble shopping for. Below, I offer some advice. (And if you’re one of the intended recipients, sorry for the spoilers!) Submissions have been lightly edited for length and clarity. My 82-year-old uncle, who loves books, art and L.G.B.T.Q. history, and who recently started using a wheelchair. —A.A.F. If your uncle is a little closer to home these days, he might appreciate some of the beautiful finds in our guide to housewarming gifts. I’m particularly fond of the Heller Asti ice bucket — which actually is a piece of art, with a permanent home in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Or how about a Danny DeVito head planter, or, from that same Etsy store, a cast of Lucille Ball or Sir Elton John? My son and his wife. Both 43-year-old doctors. Vegetarian foodies. I am on Social Security and it’s difficult to think of something —R.A.J. My colleague Mari Uyehara put together some great ideas in our gift guide for foodies — and the silicone pot grips shaped like jumbo pasta bow ties are a real standout. They’re just over $20 and so functional. And we agree with our colleagues at New York Times Cooking that “Six Seasons of Pasta” is one of the best cookbooks of the year. My husband. He is a tool guy and has just about every tool known to man. —R.I. Bet he doesn’t have this $300 titanium hammer that Doug Mahoney, Wirecutter’s home improvement writer (and an ex-carpenter), swears by! “As impossible as it sounds, the benefits of titanium justify its ridiculous cost, especially to someone used to swinging a hammer,” Doug says. Or maybe he needs a set of air wedges, which have saved the lumbar of Liam McCabe, another home improvement writer. My grandchildren, ages 4 ½ and 3. They have lots of toys, art supplies, books and gadgets already! I don’t want anything with A.I. in it and I’m also concerned about too much “stuff.” —P.W. What about a book subscription service? Our favorite allows you to personalize by the child’s age and interests. Or you could go with some practical items to help them get involved in everyday tasks, like an apron and a set of mini cooking tools. One of our favorite STEM toys is a programmable robot — our experts on babies and kids appreciate how it offers loads of screen-free fun, but is still modern enough to hold kids’ attention. My mom, who hates everything I get her. She doesn’t like robes or skin care and doesn’t have any hobbies outside of taking care of her adult kids and her own mother. —M.B. For the trickiest recipients, go back to basics. Even this woman eats and sleeps. I wonder if she’d enjoy noshing on any of our kitchen team’s favorite food gift baskets? (The sweet and savory Zingerman’s one, which has a transcendent sour cream coffee cake and excellent Maine Cheddar, is particularly nice to share.) A box of chocolates could also be a lovely offering. And I can’t help but think a digital frame preloaded with photos of the people she loves could spark joy — or at least something like it. For more gifting help, check out: The best gifts for everyone on your list. Gifts for people who have everything. And here’s our big holiday gift guide, a joint effort from Times and Wirecutter journalists. THE LATEST NEWS Trump Administration James Comey Doug Mills/The New York Times A federal judge halted the Justice Department’s attempt to seek another indictment against James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, over concerns that the bulk of evidence in the case was obtained improperly. President Trump’s approval rating has dipped slightly after months of holding steady, according to a Times analysis. The Trump administration issued a new security strategy that called for European countries to take “primary responsibility” for their own defense. Hong Kong The Hong Kong government is pushing to increase turnout in today’s legislative elections, which are going ahead despite last month’s deadly apartment complex fire. The elections are largely devoid of opposition parties, and pro-establishment candidates approved by Beijing are all but certain to dominate. Hong Kong’s national security police arrested a 71-year-old man and accused him of posting videos about investigations related to the fire. Immigration Joe Biden at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023. Doug Mills/The New York Times Early in his administration, Joe Biden ignored warnings about a surge at the border and rejected recommendations that could have alleviated it, a Times investigation found. Those decisions helped Trump win back the White House. ICE agents arrested a Harvard professor weeks after he fired a pellet gun near a synagogue and officials accused him of antisemitism. He said he had been hunting rats. Other Big Stories Japan accused China of aiming military radar at its fighter jets as they flew over international waters; China disputed the account. Tensions between the countries are rising over Japan’s support for Taiwan. Experts warn that the increasing availability of stablecoins, a cryptocurrency tied to the U.S. dollar, could make it harder to cut off criminal networks from the global banking system. A man in Michigan died of rabies after receiving a kidney transplant from another man who had died of the virus. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Should schools let students use artificial intelligence? No. A.I. as a tool encourages students to cheat and to stop thinking. “Artificial intelligence, simply, takes the onus for learning away from the student,” Barth Keck writes for CT News Junkie. Yes. Students need to be proficient with A.I. in order to be prepared for the next generation of work. “If the true goal of K-12 education is to equip students with the skills for the future, then we must be honest about what that future includes,” Ruhan Gupta writes for The Austin American-Statesman. FROM OPINION The Supreme Court’s conservative justices are enabling Trump’s campaign to undermine the Constitution, the editorial board writes. Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the deficit of Christian morality in the Trump administration and Jessica Grose on a contentious paper at the University of Oklahoma. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Mario Nawfal Katarina Premfors for The New York Times Influencing the influencer: This man has a knack for getting Elon Musk’s attention, and for turning that into big business. Young Republicans: William Hendrix dreamed of a life in politics. This is how he ended up joining a racist, antisemitic group chat and losing his job. What a Waymo couldn’t see: A video shows what happened before a self-driving taxi killed a beloved cat in San Francisco. Your pick: The Morning’s most-read story yesterday was an overview of the work of Frank Gehry. SPORTS College football: Indiana capped off its undefeated season with a win over Ohio State in the Big Ten title game, while Duke knocked Virginia out of playoff contention in the A.C.C. Here’s a recap of the conference championship games. M.L.S.: Lionel Messi helped Inter Miami claim the M.L.S. Cup for the first time in a 3-1 win over the Vancouver Whitecaps. BOOK OF THE WEEK By Elisabeth Egan “The American Revolution,” by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns: Leave your elementary school civics lessons at the door as you tackle this best-selling companion to Ken Burns’s PBS series about the Revolutionary War. It turns out, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware happened a bit differently than many of us learned it; he wasn’t “standing up in the ice-filled river in the middle of a winter storm at night,” Ward and Burns write. Nor did anyone on Bunker Hill yell, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!”; the battle wasn’t even on Bunker Hill. With the help of maps, paintings, meticulous research and essays from six well-known historians, Ward and Burns shed new light on our country’s complicated and bloody origin story. “We can’t avoid the American Revolution,” our reviewer wrote, “so we might as well face it squarely.” Related: Looking for a gift for a reader? Here are a few recent releases to consider. THE INTERVIEW Kristen Stewart Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By David Marchese This week’s subject for The Interview is the actor Kristen Stewart, whose feature-film directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water,” which is in select theaters now, raises questions about womanhood, sexuality, excess and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves. I was watching another interview you did recently, and at the end, the interviewer asked you for a cultural recommendation that you would give for Hollywood, and you mentioned a film by Barbara Hammer called “Multiple Orgasm.” For people who aren’t familiar with that work, can you explain what it is? It’s an impressionistic, experimental short film by a woman who’s just astoundingly prolific. I saw that movie and was so shocked, because there’s a sequence in my film that is very similar. You buried the lede. The film is close-up images of a woman masturbating, interspersed with images of natural scenery. It’s relating the female body to organic material that feels very Georgia O’Keeffe. The fact that you recommended that film, combined with the sexual forthrightness of “The Chronology of Water,” and then last year you made “Love Lies Bleeding,” which had so much to do with queer eroticism — all these in conjunction made me wonder if there are things you’ve realized about sex that you’ve wanted to explore in your work recently. I love watching things that don’t feel performative, that feel inhabited and instinctive, instead of: Oh, I’m thinking about this from the outside. How does this look? That’s often how women have sex. You want to perform and display that you’re into it and good at it — maybe if you can perform that, then it can be true. There’s a slower, more undulating experience that can happen as you get older that I would like to start seeing in art. I think that my movie emulates the more pleasantly frustrating, longer experience of a success story, which is potentially also related to climax: You plateau into contentment after a lot of false victories and false starts, and then you achieve something that feels self-earned, even if accompanied. I’ve seen a lot of sex scenes that are titillating and exterior. I never again want to stand in a room and watch two people [expletive]. That’s our whole lives. It’s nice to get an odd angle of it. Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Photo illustration by Justin Metz Click above to read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Quit caffeine, if you dare. There’s never been a better time to try. Add some vintage touches to your home. See what one designer did. Reconsider wallpaper. New technology allows printing that can mimic three-dimensional scenes. MEAL PLAN Ghazalle Badiozamani for The New York Times We’re in the lull of early December, the time before Holiday Party Season really heats up, when you can still have a bowl of soup for dinner, affix yourself to the couch and then get a good night’s sleep. Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter suggests a plush red lentil soup made with coconut milk and curry powder, plus more options. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were autocracy and carryout. Can you put eight historical events — including the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the pirate Blackbeard and “E.T.” — 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. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 9, 2025 Author Members Posted December 9, 2025 December 8, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. President Trump was the host of the Kennedy Center Honors last night, an event he once shunned. China’s trade surplus officially surpassed $1 trillion, an excess of exports to imports that no country had ever reached. And Volodymyr Zelensky plans to meet with European leaders today. Let’s start there, with Ukraine, and look at how a corruption scandal is testing the government. Volodymyr Zelensky at a nuclear power plant in western Ukraine. Alex Babenko/Associated Press Corruption chaos “Is it possible to become president and not steal?” Volodymyr Zelensky asked before he became president of Ukraine in 2019. “It’s a rhetorical question, as no one has tried so far.” Now his top advisers are tangled in a graft investigation. It threatens his popularity and his government — all while Russia advances on the battlefield and President Trump pushes a peace plan that favors Moscow. A New York Times investigation details how that happened. The allegations Ukrainian investigators say that a criminal organization led by Zelensky’s former business partner embezzled $100 million from the country’s publicly owned nuclear power company, Energoatom. Even as Ukrainians endured blackouts caused by Russian bombing, members of the president’s inner circle skimmed money from Energoatom contracts. Here’s how the scheme worked: Energoatom awarded contracts to get work done. Then, a criminal group that included Energoatom employees and a former government adviser demanded that the recipients quietly give them up to 15 percent of those funds — basically after-the-fact bribes if they wanted to keep getting paid. New details When the war began, Ukraine’s Western allies wanted to figure out how to send money to Kyiv without seeing it vanish into the pockets of corrupt officials. To protect the money, they insisted that Zelensky’s government allow groups of outside experts, known as supervisory boards, to work as watchdogs. But the Ukrainian government has sabotaged that oversight, allowing corruption to flourish, the Times investigation found. Zelensky’s administration stacked the supervisory boards with loyalists, left seats empty or prevented boards from being set up at all. Leaders in Kyiv even rewrote various company charters to limit oversight, which allowed the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without outsiders asking questions about where that money was going. Zelensky has blamed Energoatom’s supervisory board for failing to stop the corruption. But, according to documents and interviews with officials, it was the government itself that prevented the board from doing its job. Zelensky’s role Zelensky himself has not been directly implicated in the corruption. But his policies may have enabled it. After Russia’s invasion, Zelensky relaxed anti-corruption rules in the name of boosting the war effort. He worked with political and business figures he had once called criminals, and, this summer, he tried to curtail the independence of anticorruption investigators as they pursued the case that ultimately implicated his associates. (He reversed course after Ukrainians poured into the streets in the country’s first large antigovernment protests during the war, saying that Zelensky was threatening Ukraine’s fragile democracy.) In the course of the investigation, Zelensky asked for the resignation of two ministers and his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. A backlash The scandal has thrown Zelensky’s government into chaos. Political opponents are coalescing around the first major anti-Zelensky movement since the Russian invasion began. And Yermak, now gone, had been running the country’s peace negotiations with Trump and others. It’s an awkward situation for Ukraine’s supporters abroad. They saw a smaller nation stand up to a larger bully that wants to tear it apart. It’s difficult to cast the victim as virtuous, though, when its government is engulfed in a corruption scandal. Let’s be clear: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with a domestic graft scandal. But the corruption does make it harder to tell a simplistic story about justice. More on Ukraine Russian troops continue to gain ground in eastern Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian military to prepare for winter combat, signaling after peace talks that he is not budging from his demands. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that radiation levels have not increased outside Chernobyl, even though a part of the complex has been malfunctioning since a Russian missile strike earlier this year. COCAINE SUPERHIGHWAY The New York Times Washington has made combating fentanyl a priority. But that has meant cocaine trafficking has surged — especially in Ecuador. People there are living in fear as violence surges and cartels battle one another and the authorities. Ecuador is now the world’s largest exporter of cocaine, even though it’s not a major producer. It’s a superhighway for the drug, my colleague Maria Abi-Habib reports. Click the video above to watch her share what she learned on her trip there. THE LATEST NEWS Asia China’s trade surplus passed $1 trillion for the first time. The country’s weak currency has helped make Chinese products attractive. Thailand launched airstrikes on Cambodian military targets as the countries continued a border dispute. Hong Kong had a near-record low in its election turnout, Reuters reports. Many people are angry about the deadly fire there. Middle East In Gaza City. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times In Gaza, the war weakened Hamas — but the group has become more powerful since Israeli troops withdrew. Many Syrians celebrated the first anniversary of the fall of the Assad regime. The country is grappling with sectarian violence and deep economic challenges. More International News Food aid in Chad. Caitlin Kelly/Associated Press The U.N. is planning to halve its 2026 emergency aid budget, a response to the drastic cuts by the U.S. and European governments to foreign aid. A big social media experiment is starting this week in Australia: A new law intended to keep kids under 16 off social media is going into effect. In Benin, some members of the military attempted a coup. Washington Democrats called for the release of the classified video of deadly boat attacks. Congress is preparing to pass a $900 billion defense bill. The Supreme Court will hear arguments today in a case that challenges the president’s ability to fire independent government officials. Immigration The Trump administration sent a plane carrying Iranian deportees to Tehran for only the second time. Hundreds of people gathered in New York to protest ICE’s separation of a 6-year-old from his father. Restaurants in New Orleans, a city known for its food, are struggling to find workers because of immigration raids. Libraries Two men stole more than a dozen works of art, including eight by Henri Matisse, from a library in São Paulo, Brazil. A water leak damaged hundreds of documents at a library in the Louvre. OPINIONS Can we agree kids don’t need Doritos at school? Lindsey Smith Taillie examines a crisis for children’s health. Here is a column by Ezra Klein on social media regulation. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Circus dogs. Amy Lombard for The New York Times Good dogs! Alexis Soloski, who reports on the arts, went backstage at the Big Apple Circus recently to meet the dogs who perform in the show. They have different abilities and different personalities, she writes: “a diva, a sweetheart, a lunatic, a star.” Some even help to shape the act. There’s a bit when a dog goes down a slide backward. “That was a canine improvisation,” Alexis writes. “So is a gag in which a dog pushes down hurdles instead of jumping over them.” Aspen of the East? A developer wants invest $3 billion to to build a new base village at the Killington ski resort in central Vermont, which has never been known for its amenities. But is Vermont ready for that? Instagram-official: Katy Perry posted photos with Justin Trudeau in Japan. People freaked out. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked story yesterday was a review of an air wedge, a tiny airbag that can lift an entire fridge. Metropolitan Diary: 13 dinners, 13 records. TODAY’S NUMBER 8 — That’s how many months Dario Vitale was creative director of Versace for, before the Prada Group announced that he was leaving after presenting a single collection. SPORTS N.C.A.A.: Notre Dame opted out of playing a bowl game after missing the College Football Playoff by one spot. N.F.L.: For the first time in nine seasons, the Kansas City Chiefs will not win the AFC West division. The Chiefs also could miss the postseason for the first time since 2014. RECIPE OF THE DAY David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich. Here’s an excellent recipe for pad see ew from the chef and cookbook writer Arnold Myint: stir-fried noodles dressed in a fragrant mixture of soy and oyster sauces. It’s made here with skinless, boneless chicken thighs, but you could prepare it with beef, shrimp, tofu or pork belly. To replicate the smoky char you get in the dish when it’s prepared in a restaurant — or better yet in a Bangkok food stall — use your biggest stainless steel pan, and get it ripping hot. (Turn your stove vent to high and open some windows.) Finish with prik nam som, a chile vinegar you can make yourself in just a couple of minutes. A YEAR OF ART BASELS Art Basel Paris. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times Our critic Jason Farago attended all four glittery Art Basel fairs this year, in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Paris and, most recently, Miami Beach. (Hey, it’s a living.) What he discovered, beyond some terrific art: Art fairs have not brought about the death of art galleries, as for years dealers and critics complained that they would. They didn’t become Walmarts for well-heeled collectors. In fact, the Basels were filled with galleries and gallerists. And despite all the spectacle, the art came first. More on culture Cast members of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” who are on the most stylish list. Lyvans Boolaky/Getty Images Who was the most stylish person this year? We picked 67. The list includes Pope Leo and the “West Village girl.” Our critics Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz selected the 48 best songs of 2025. It’s a delight to explore the list for validations and discovery alike. Also, there’s fantastic wordplay. Here’s Jon on “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” from Brandon Lake and Jelly Roll: “Imagine salvation were a W.W.E. match.” Great news for fans of field guides. (That’s me!) They’re having a moment, and just in time for gift-giving. You might try “Fishes of the Chicago Region” for a pal on the South Side. “California Lizards and How to Find Them” for a cousin in Indio? Definitely “Moths of Western North America” for my in-laws in Oregon! THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Watch the Philadelphia Eagles play the Los Angeles Chargers tonight. They’re both 8-4, so it could be an enjoyably tense evening. Review what the jet-setters at Wirecutter have determined, over multiple long-haul flights, to be the best travel pillow. Stay healthy this winter with our guide to symptoms of cold, flu and Covid — and how to get tested for each. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was thrilling. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 10, 2025 Author Members Posted December 10, 2025 December 9, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. President Trump is making the argument that his tariffs are working, but he’s also rolling out $12 billion to bail out farmers. Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine would reject the U.S. proposal to cede land to Russia. And today, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the way political campaigns are funded. The justices heard arguments yesterday in a case that will determine how much power the president has over independent federal agencies. Let’s start there. The presidential seal. Eric Lee/The New York Times Power to the presidency The case, Trump v. Slaughter, is about whether President Trump can fire leaders from those agencies. If the court rules that he can do so at will, my colleague Ann E. Marimow reports, it’s a very big deal — a significant expansion of presidential power. It would overturn a judicial precedent set 90 years ago, during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the court said Congress could limit a president’s ability to get rid of independent commissioners who hadn’t done something deeply wrong. Trump did just that. In March, he fired Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic appointee, from her position as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, saying that she did not align with his administration’s priorities. The court probably won’t rule on the matter until late spring. But what our reporters heard from the justices yesterday was clear. The conservative majority seems poised to overturn or at least strictly limit the 1935 precedent, giving the president more control of government bodies that were meant to be nonpartisan. Safe from meddling Federal law limits the president’s authority to fire government officials who work for more than two dozen independent governmental agencies. That is designed to shield their independence, to protect them from the storms of politics. Roosevelt tested the law when he fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission whose agenda did not match his own. In that case, the court ruled unanimously that the firing was illegal. Since then, the Supreme Court has chipped away at the precedent without completely overturning it. During the 1980s, the future chief justice, John Roberts, then a Reagan staffer, argued that the White House should control independent federal agencies. The argument, as Ann recently explained, was part of a push for more executive power under the so-called unitary executive theory, which says the president has absolute control over the executive branch. Under Roberts’s leadership, the court’s majority has moved in that direction. In 2020, during Trump’s first term, the justices said the president could fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without cause because the agency has only one director. The F.T.C. has more than one leader, but the conservative justices signaled yesterday that because the agency has grown since the original ruling, its constitutional status may have changed. Roberts characterized the 1935 precedent as “a dried husk” of its former self, saying it was written for an earlier time when the commission wielded much less power. What lies ahead Rebecca Slaughter Al Drago for The New York Times The ruling, when it comes, could affect more than two dozen other agencies that protect consumers, workers, the environment and more. They’ve traditionally been insulated from presidential control. They include the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission — where Trump has also ousted Democratic leaders. (The Supreme Court let him do so while the cases make their way through lower courts.) Institutions run along partisan lines would be less likely to rule against a president’s priorities while adjudicating things like employee firings, antitrust cases and labor disputes. One caveat: Some justices have suggested that the coming decision will not affect the Federal Reserve, which helps manage the economy and which may require unique protections from presidential interference. Next month, though, the justices will consider whether the president can fire Lisa Cook, a Fed governor whom Trump has accused of mortgage fraud. And so we wait. For Adam Liptak, our legal affairs reporter, what loomed large over the argument was last year’s Supreme Court decision granting Trump substantial immunity from prosecution — meaning he can do pretty much what he wants as president and it’s not a crime. In the justices’ responses yesterday, Adam observed, “there has been repeated reference to that decision’s expansive vision of presidential power.” What Roosevelt wanted, in other words, Trump very well could get. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. THE LATEST NEWS Politics Farming in Iowa. Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times Trump announced $12 billion in assistance for farmers. Many have been struggling since China started boycotting American products in response to Trump’s tariffs. Congress is trying to push the Pentagon to release details about its boat strike orders in a defense policy bill. Alina Habba, a Trump loyalist, resigned as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey after a court found that she had been serving unlawfully. Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas, a rising Democratic star, is running for Senate. Kash Patel this year fired more than a dozen F.B.I. agents who knelt during a 2020 protest over George Floyd’s killing. Some of them are now suing the agency. National parks will no longer offer free entrance on M.L.K. Day and Juneteenth. They will be free for visitors on other holidays like Flag Day, which is also Trump’s birthday. Trump’s approval rating has dipped slightly after months of holding steady. The change reflects voters’ frustration with the economy. Click the video below to watch Tyler Pager, a White House correspondent, explain the numbers. International Drone strikes on a kindergarten and a hospital in Sudan killed more than 100 people. Doctors blamed a paramilitary group. The government of Honduras issued an international arrest warrant for the country’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández. He was pardoned by Trump and is wanted on charges of fraud and money laundering. As Thailand and Cambodia fight again along a disputed border, many people are rushing to find shelter. The conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands. Afghanistan and Pakistan are in a trade war with no end in sight. Business Days after Netflix announced a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount took its own offer directly to shareholders in a bid for a hostile takeover. The Trump administration will allow Nvidia to sell its second-most-powerful chip to China. Apps like Sora, developed by OpenAI, are fooling millions of users into thinking A.I. videos are real, even when they include warning labels. Mental Health New York City’s subway trains hit more than 250 people last year. The collisions take a toll on drivers’ mental health, but many of them struggle to get even basic care. Children’s mental health improved significantly after Covid school shutdowns ended, according to a new study, which could shape how officials respond to future epidemics. Catholicism The Archdiocese of New York will negotiate a sexual abuse settlement for about 1,300 victims. The archdiocese is trying to raise at least $300 million to do so. A Catholic church in Massachusetts put up a Nativity scene with a missing Jesus and a sign reading “ICE Was Here.” It has kept the display up despite an order from Boston’s archdiocese to remove it. PANT-THEON Dogs in a Shinto shrine. Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times When Japanese children have a milestone birthday, many go to a shrine. It’s a rite of passage called Shichi-Go-San, or 7-5-3, for kids turning those ages. Now, dogs are being honored, too. At some Shinto shrines, pets even outnumber children. Japan has one of the world’s lowest birthrates, but pet ownership is booming. A shrine in Tokyo now welcomes more than 350 pets for the ceremony each year, compared with about 50 children. Dog owners are splurging on wigs, amulets and tailor-made jackets for the occasion. See photos here. OPINION The New York Times A classified Pentagon report assessed how the U.S. would fare in a conflict with China. It was called the Overmatch brief. “The picture it paints is consistent and disturbing,” the editorial board writes. The brief traces a decades-long decline in America’s military dominance. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, has said that in the Pentagon’s war games against China, “we lose every time.” When a senior Biden official received the Overmatch brief in 2021, he turned pale, according to one official who was present. The military must get smarter with its money to revitalize its capacity, the board argues. Read the first part of a series. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Kabawa in Manhattan. Janice Chung for The New York Times Dining out: Discover the best new restaurants in New York City for 2025, including Sunn’s and Kabawa. Art in captivity: A Chinese artist, awaiting trial on slandering charges, is still creating work and sending it to his family. Your Pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about Katy Perry’s Instagram post that featured Justin Trudeau. TODAY’S NUMBER 3 — That is the age of the youngest rated chess player in history. Meet Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha of India. SPORTS Olympics: The Philippines, a country where snow has never fallen in recorded history, might make the Olympics in curling. The team is calling its journey “Curl Runnings.” N.B.A.: Terry Rozier, the Miami Heat guard charged with manipulating his performance to help gamblers, pleaded not guilty in federal court in Brooklyn. RECIPE OF THE DAY Melina Hammer for The New York Times Buy a rotisserie chicken on the way home and you’re halfway through this recipe for chicken enchiladas with salsa verde, which I learned to make in Houston, at the elbow of the great Tex-Mex scholar and restaurateur Robb Walsh. If you don’t want to roll the tortillas, make like the New Mexicans and stack them, or combine the salsa verde with the shredded chicken and use it as a filling for tacos. Do I judge you for using canned enchilada sauce instead of making your own? I do not. The one made by the Hatch Chile Company is terrific. IT’S ALAN’S UNIVERSE Alan Chikin Chow Philip Cheung for The New York Times Alan Chikin Chow’s YouTube series, “Alan’s Universe,” has about 100 million subscribers — 35 million more than Taylor Swift. His videos are viewed, on average, more than one billion times a month, largely by members of Generation Alpha. Matt Stevens, a reporter who covers the arts, recently spent time with Chow in his 10,000-square-foot production studio in Los Angeles, where his team has put down roots even as traditional Hollywood is leaving the city. “It’s 100 percent my intention to build this franchise,” Chow said, “into the next Disney.” THE GOLDEN GLOBES Nominations for the 83rd Golden Globes were announced yesterday. “One Battle After Another” received the most nominations of any film, with nine. The biggest winner yesterday was the little indie studio Neon, which received 21 overall nominations, the most of any studio. Its list includes four best picture nods for “It Was Just an Accident,” “The Secret Agent,” “Sentimental Value” and “No Other Choice.” Netflix pulled in more than a dozen nominations, most notably for “Frankenstein” and “KPop Demon Hunters.” In television, “The White Lotus” dominated with six nominations. Snubs and surprises? There were a few! More on television ABC extended Jimmy Kimmel’s contract for another year. Late night hosts joked about Trump’s peace prize from FIFA. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS In Dresden. Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times Explore Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony. It’s grand to wander along the Elbe, but make time for the funicular up to the Weisser Hirsch neighborhood. Warm your ankles with the best space heater, recommended by Wirecutter’s gurus of home heating. Fall asleep more quickly. Practice cognitive shuffling. You’ll see. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was baptize. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 11, 2025 Author Members Posted December 11, 2025 December 10, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. President Trump had a rally last night to discuss the cost of living. He kept going off script. And in Australia, a social media ban for children under 16 has taken effect. Some teens aren’t happy. I’d like to start, though, with two very different pieces of business. One’s about the drama surrounding the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, by Netflix or Paramount. The other’s about climate fixes that are actually working. FIGHT FOR THE STREAMING FUTURE Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif. Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times Paramount and Netflix are in a corporate knife fight, competing for the chance to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, including its TV and film studios, its HBO Max streaming service and (maybe, depending on how everything shakes out) its cable channels, including CNN. It could be the biggest media deal in a decade — shaping the news, shows and movies consumed by hundreds of millions of people around the world. What is happening? Last week, Netflix unveiled an $83 billion deal to take control of Warner Bros. On Monday, Paramount tried to snatch the deal away, going straight to Warner Bros. shareholders with what it called a superior offer, one that valued the company at approximately $108 billion. Aggressive! How is Trump responding? Either deal would need the government’s blessing. And President Trump has broken precedent by placing himself at the center of the regulatory process, our media reporter Michael Grynbaum explained. “I’ll be involved in that decision,” Trump vowed. Paramount and Netflix have both made nice with Trump. Ted Sarandos, a chief executive of Netflix, visited the Oval Office in November, while David Ellison, the Paramount chairman, was spotted with Trump on Sunday, just hours before his company made its offer. What could happen next? It’s possible a Paramount victory could bring the future company more in line with Trump’s views. Ellison and Trump are close, and a private equity firm founded by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is part of the Paramount deal. The president says a Netflix win “could be a problem,” giving it too much market power. That’s Paramount’s argument, too. Still, Trump has praised Sarandos. And while Paramount, which owns CBS, paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit that Trump brought against “60 Minutes,” Trump has continued to criticize the show. He wrote that since CBS came under Ellison’s leadership, “60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!” Warner Bros. Discovery said it would have more to say next week. Stay tuned. 50 states, 50 fixes The New York Times Solutions to big, seemingly intractable environmental problems are hard to come by. But people all over the country are coming up with local answers. The Times set out this year to document one of those solutions in every state. Let us take you to a few of them. South Dakota During a class at South Dakota State University. Joe Dickie Photography For decades, Eastern red cedar trees have crept across South Dakota and the Plains States, earning them a regional nickname: the “green glacier.” The spread has overtaken native grasslands, which are one of the most endangered kinds of habitats in the world. They’ve also drastically reduced the amount of land available for grazing. Ranchers in the state have embraced an old method for getting that land back: They carefully burn specific parcels. As Native tribes in the region did for generations before settlers began suppressing fire in the late 19th century, they burn the land in order to preserve it. See what’s happening in South Dakota. Texas It’s not just oil under the ground in the Lone Star State. There’s also geothermal energy. It has made the state a hub of innovation in geothermal power. One of the new systems works by using electricity to pump water deep into underground cracks — similar to gas fracking. Once it’s there, the “well” holds the water under pressure. When electricity is needed on the grid, technicians release a valve, sending the water through a turbine, turning the water pressure back into electricity. Just don’t call it renewable energy. “We describe it as inexhaustible rather than renewable,” one leader in the field told The Times. Read more about Texas. Utah In Millville, Utah. (And yes, it’s normal for beavers to have orange teeth.) Kim Raff for The New York Times Beavers are top-notch engineers, driven to slow flowing water and create ponds. They’re a nuisance for ranchers across the West, some of whom loathe the animals for their ability to wreak havoc on pastures, leaving them muddy and unpassable. But they can also be a force for good. Their dams reduce runoff, recharge groundwater, build habitat for fish and other wildlife, help streams recover sediment and create watering holes. In Utah, that led to an idea: Why not relocate the nuisance beavers to places where their dams would be helpful — improving the environment, rather than destroying it? Check out these beavers in Utah. Wyoming More than 620,000 miles of barbed-wire fences divide the American West. They keep cattle contained. They’re expensive to build and expensive to maintain. A single mile of new fence line can cost a rancher $25,000. And margins in that business are thin. Enter virtual fences and GPS collars, which some livestock managers are using on their cattle in Wyoming to manage their herds from afar, with much less need for fencing. The tech is reminiscent of the invisible fencing used by some suburban dog owners. As a cow approaches a boundary, the collar beeps. If she crosses, it delivers a mild electric shock. Ranchers use GPS coordinates to set precise boundaries on pastures to keep cows away from streams or sagebrush. They can move cows around to prevent overgrazing. They can also monitor cows’ exact locations, and, if they see the herd bunched up, they can ride out to see if the animals are under threat from a wolf or a grizzly bear. Another benefit: With fewer fences, elk, pronghorn and mule deer can migrate more easily. Read about the other 46 states and fixes here. They include the Library of Things in Maine and, in Florida, the rise of the “mangrove mamas.” THE LATEST NEWS Politics President Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times President Trump gave the first of a series of speeches intended to alleviate Americans’ concerns about the cost of living, but instead he mocked the term “affordability.” Miami voters elected a Democratic mayor, Eileen Higgins, for the first time in almost 30 years. Marco Rubio ordered the State Department to return its default font to Times New Roman. It rejected the Biden administration’s switch to Calibri, done for accessibility reasons, as a D.E.I play. Supreme Court The Supreme Court heard arguments about whether to lift campaign finance limits. That case, brought by Republican groups, could undercut one of Democrats’ financial advantages in the midterm elections. Today, the justices will revisit how states assess intellectual disabilities to decide who should be spared the death penalty. More on the Courts A federal judge granted the government’s motion to unseal records from the grand jury investigation into Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion. For the third time, a judge suggested that Lindsey Halligan, the Trump-appointed prosecutor who pursued criminal charges against Letitia James and James Comey, should resign. Latin America The Times uncovered more details about how the Pentagon has scrambled to deal with survivors of Caribbean boat strikes. The goal has been to keep the survivors out of the U.S. justice system, where courts could demand justification for the military’s campaign. Legal groups sued for the release of a secret memo justifying the attacks. And Democrats said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wouldn’t commit to showing Congress the full video of a contentious strike from Sept. 2. María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, has embraced Trump’s military buildup. Here is a look at the long history of U.S. military intervention in Latin America. War in Ukraine Source: The Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (as of Dec. 8, 2025) Josh Holder After weeks of peace talks and high-level meetings, Russia and Ukraine remain far apart on a central issue: who gets to keep a chunk of land about the size of Delaware. Trump called Europe “decaying” and criticized leaders there for their handling of migration and the war in Ukraine. Lithuania’s government declared a nationwide emergency over suspicious balloons that have floated in from Belarus, Russia’s main European ally. More International News An executive left the Taiwanese company TSMC, the world’s leading computer chip maker, to work for Intel. The Taiwanese government says the move could threaten its national security. Israel continues to bar journalists from freely entering Gaza despite a cease-fire. The Foreign Press Association in Israel called the ban “beyond absurd.” OPINIONS Congress pours billions of dollars into the Pentagon, but much of it goes to waste. The safety of the country depends on getting serious about the military’s finances, the editorial board writes. Early-decision college applications are a racket. They should be shut down, Daniel Currell writes. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Japanese toilets: In public restrooms in Tokyo, you may hear birdsong, ocean waves or a babbling river. It’s courtesy audio meant to mask bathroom noises — “an auditory simulacrum of nature, perfect for responding to its call,” as Tim Hornyak writes. Now, the sound machines are becoming more popular. A formative read: There’s an enduring appeal to James Marshall’s “George and Martha” series about hippos who are best friends, Hannah Kingsley-Ma writes. She grew up reading the children’s books “the same way an athlete runs drills — in an exhaustive repetitive cycle, as if they were preparing me for something.” Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about how to fall asleep with cognitive shuffling. TODAY’S NUMBER 187,460 — That is the estimated number of miles in the Roman Empire’s road system, according to a new study. One of the longest tracks stretched from Bordeaux, France, to Jerusalem. SPORTS N.F.L.: The Indianapolis Colts are poised to bring Philip Rivers, 44, out of retirement after losing almost every quarterback on their roster to injuries. Rivers hasn’t thrown an N.F.L. pass in five years. College football: In college sports’ biggest step yet into private equity, the University of Utah is forming a partnership with a private investment firm. RECIPE OF THE DAY Beef biryani with cumin raita. Linda Xiao for The New York Times When you can make something delicious and complicated quickly, you generally have to rely on what we call in the cooking game a cheat. (A cheat is a good thing!) For this weeknight beef biryani, you get the rice going in a Dutch oven, then brown up a mixture of ground meat, spices and aromatics in a skillet. Get the meat on top of the still-cooking rice, cover and allow it all to come together while you whisk together a musky, tangy cumin raita to drizzle over the top. Thirty minutes. Five stars! YOU LOOK SPECTACULAR John Taggart for The New York Times In the social media demimonde of downtown Manhattan, Judi Jupiter has become one of the city’s most improbable chroniclers of street style. In the 1970s, she was a house photographer at Studio 54, capturing images of Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol and many others. Now, at 76, she films and interviews beautiful young people with her phone, breaking through the algorithm with a combination of affable kindness and what our reporter Alex Vadukul calls a “borderline invasive curiosity.” She asks a lot of questions. “I love the Gen Z’s,” she told Alex. “I love their attitude. They think the world is in a bad place and that we’ve got to make it better. That’s their thing.” Spend some time with her. More on culture More than 125 years after British forces looted the Benin Bronzes from a royal palace, they have returned to Nigeria, where about 100 of them are on view at the Benin City National Museum. The bronzes are beautiful, but their new home is a far cry from the state-of-the-art museum that many had hoped would house them. There are no high-tech climate or security systems protect them, Alex Marshall reports from Benin City. A Nigerian cultural official said no one had any right to tell Nigerians what to do with their heritage. Gwyneth Paltrow and Jacob Elordi interviewed each other on Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series. See it here. Nnena Kalu, an artist known for making huge cocoonlike sculptures out of found fabric and videotape, won the Turner Prize yesterday. It is one of the art world’s most prestigious awards. Kalu, 59, has autism and a learning disability, with limited verbal communication. The chair of this year’s jury said she received the award for the “sheer quality and verve and beauty” of her abstract art. Late night hosts joked about the Trump administration’s push to build fitness stations at airports. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Play Skate Story, a video game about a skateboarding demon in the underworld who is made of glass. Don’t fall! Read romantasy to reinvigorate your sex life. Seriously. We spoke with women who said the genre had helped them reach a new level of intimacy. Evaporate at will with the best humidifier, approved by the water lovers at Wirecutter. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was cornball. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 12, 2025 Author Members Posted December 12, 2025 December 11, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The United States seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela yesterday, an escalation of President Trump’s campaign against the Maduro government. And the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado appeared in Oslo hours after she was supposed to accept a Nobel Peace Prize. She had been in hiding. Before we get to that, though, I’d like to take you into the world of Andrew Tate, a social media influencer accused of rape and human trafficking, who was freed from Romania after courting Trump’s allies and family members. Mark Harris Bad boys Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, are paragons of the manosphere — influencers who say a man’s role is to dominate women. In 2023, Romanian prosecutors said the brothers had seduced women and then pressed them into performing for the Tates’ pornography business. Andrew was also accused of rape. They were barred from leaving the country while prosecutors built their case. Earlier this year, though, Romania lifted the travel restrictions. An investigation by my colleagues Megan Twohey and Isabella Kwai found that support from Trump administration officials had played a crucial role in the decision. “We’re massively back,” a grinning Tate said in a video he posted in February as the brothers flew to Florida by private jet. For years, Megan and Isabella found, Andrew built relationships with Trump’s advisers and relatives, including Barron Trump, the president’s youngest son. They interviewed dozens of people in Romania, the United States and Britain. They reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents and private messages. Their work explains why the Tates are free again, at least for now. It can be hard to explain which defendants the Trump administration backs, and why, as my colleague Tyler Pager told me the other day. But apparently even people accused of rape can get a hand, even amid the furor over the Epstein files, if they have the right contacts. The White House said it had no knowledge of the brothers’ legal issues. The Tates deny any criminal wrongdoing. The Tates’ lawyer said The Times’s reporting on Andrew and Barron was “fake news.” Fall and rise Andrew Tate, left, and Tristan Tate. Daniel Mihailescu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The Tate brothers became wealthy as pornographers: They had women in Britain and, later, Romania perform live on webcams for paying customers. The business flourished on TikTok, OnlyFans and elsewhere. But they became famous as influencers, boasting to millions of followers about their mental toughness, physical discipline and entrepreneurial skill. “It’s not just about picking up girls,” Andrew said in an interview on YouTube. “It’s about converting them into really loving you enough to moving in with you and working for you and giving you all the money.” They sold courses on these subjects. One promised a Ph.D. — a “pimping hoes degree.” Between 2014 and 2022, they earned at least 21 million pounds (nearly $28 million), according to records from a British court. (A judge found that they had evaded taxes.) The brothers’ arrest in Romania made headlines around the world. Andrew didn’t shy from the news storm when it came. “He used it,” write Megan and Isabella. Andrew soon made contact with the conservative podcast host Tucker Carlson, who flew to Bucharest to interview him. Carlson didn’t press Tate on his pornography business or about his comments about women, but talked instead about their interest in what they described as a left-wing war on masculinity. Carlson at one point mischaracterized the criminal charges against Andrew, saying they had nothing to do with sexual violence or human trafficking. Tucker Carlson interviewing Andrew Tate. Megan and Isabella asked Carlson about that. He apologized for getting it wrong. “It doesn’t change my view that the Tates, whatever their personal behavior, had a message worth hearing,” he said. The Carlson interview led to more press. Charlie Kirk talked about the Tates on his podcast, agreeing that masculinity was under attack. Candace Owens, another conservative podcaster, interviewed Andrew in Bucharest. Don’t judge him for his past comments, she told her listeners. “This is how guys have fun,” she said, “the same way that girls sit around and talk about ‘Real Housewives.’” In other interviews, Andrew compared himself to President Trump, drawing parallels between the two men: pariahs on social media, unfairly targeted for prosecution, victims of political attacks. Soon, the brothers had defenders in the Trump family. Donald Trump Jr. offered support on X. “They just want to silence you,” he wrote. And Barron Trump spoke to Andrew over Zoom, the investigation found. “I’m very close to the Trump family,” Andrew said in the summer of 2024. Wheels up Then came a Romanian order that instructed prosecutors to negotiate with the Tates, Megan and Isabella write. The prime minister of Romania believed that the Trump administration would be happy with the outcome, said a person who was not authorized to discuss it. On the day the brothers left Romania for Florida, The Times asked their lawyer whether the Trump administration had aided in their release: “Do the math,” he said. “These guys are on the plane.” The Tate brothers are by no means free of trouble. They are still under investigation in Romania, Britain and, as Megan and Isabella learned, the United States. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, said the Tates were not welcome in his state. They continue to bounce around. “I’m in Dubai, I’m still rich, all I do is win,” Andrew said in a video posted in April. It shows him driving away in a Bugatti. I urge you to read the entirety of Megan and Isabella’s investigation. DEFENSE BILL The House approved a $900 billion defense bill that would give U.S. troops a raise and codify much of Trump’s national security agenda. It goes next to the Senate, which is expected to approve it overwhelmingly. Here are a few interesting details from the bill: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget will fall by 25 percent unless he releases the command orders for and unedited videos of the military’s boat strikes. The U.S. will lift sanctions on Syria. Transgender women will be barred from participating in women’s athletic programs at U.S. service academies. The U.S. will supply Ukraine with $400 million in annual security assistance through 2027. The bill does not rename the Defense Department the “Department of War,” as Trump has called it. THE LATEST NEWS Venezuela María Corina Machado Jonas Been Henriksen/NTB Scanpix, via Associated Press Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, appeared on a hotel balcony in Oslo in the middle of the night. Her supporters cheered for her from below. The tanker seized by the U.S. was carrying Venezuelan oil, an official said, adding that a judge recently issued a warrant for the operation because of the ship’s history smuggling oil for Iran. The ship may have been trying to conceal its whereabouts by broadcasting falsified location data, a Times analysis found. Immigration via trumpcard. gov The Trump administration debuted a website where people can apply for its “gold card” visas. They will cost more than $1 million. The Pentagon has diverted at least $2 billion from its core missions this year to support Trump’s immigration crackdown, according to a report by Democratic lawmakers. More on Politics The head of the Federal Aviation Administration had not complied with an agreement to divest from the airline he used to run, a government ethics agency said. The F.D.A. has expanded its investigation into deaths possibly linked to the Covid vaccine. International In Yemen, a separatist group has taken control of parts of the country. The group is backed by the U.A.E., and its leader said the group wants to take the capital. Mexico approved tariffs on Chinese imports after U.S. pressure. The highest rate will be 50 percent. A military group backed by Rwanda said it had captured a city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last week, the countries signed a peace deal alongside Trump. The Louvre heist was caught on video, investigators say. The museum’s director previously said a security camera had been facing the wrong way. Other Big Stories A judge ordered the Trump administration to end its National Guard deployment in Los Angeles, saying the government had illegally kept troops in the city long after intense protests had ended. (The administration is expected to appeal.) The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point. But the vote was divided, suggesting officials might be reluctant to cut rates again in the near future. Evacuations are underway in Washington State after heavy rain. Up to 100,000 people could be affected. An Army gynecologist was charged with secretly recording more than 40 of his patients at Fort Hood in Texas. THE MORNING QUIZ This question comes from a recent edition of the newsletter. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.) Some restaurants in New Orleans, a city famous for its dining, are struggling to find supplies — and even to stay open. Why? New tariffs on Vietnam have slashed crawfish imports. Tourism is unexpectedly down this holiday season. Marshland erosion has killed thousands of oyster beds. Workers are staying home as immigration agents fan out across town. OPINIONS The U.S. should commit to overthrowing Nicolás Maduro, Ricardo Hausmann and Jose Morales-Arilla argue. Emily Bazelon and David French discuss this week’s Supreme Court cases. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Intangible riches: Yodeling in the Swiss Alps, swimming in an Icelandic pool and sitting down to a home-cooked meal in Italy are protected elements of international cultural heritage after UNESCO released an expanded list yesterday. Street food from Egypt, handmade paper from Japan and Deepavali, India’s festival of lights, also made the list. Menopause: You know menopause can cause hot flashes. But did you know it can also lead to a dry mouth, heart palpitations or urinary tract infections? Read what it does to the body. “Confessions of a Shopaholic”: Writing under the pseudonym Sophie Kinsella, Madeleine Wickham cultivated an international following for her novels about a financial journalist with a weakness for retail consumption. Wickham died at 55. TODAY’S NUMBER 58.5 — That is the number of pounds of beef, on average, that American consumers are projected to eat this year, according to forecasts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s down from last year, as the cost of steak is soaring. SPORTS College football: Michigan’s former football coach Sherrone Moore was in custody after he was fired over what the school called an inappropriate relationship. M.L.B.: Pete Alonso, the Mets’ all-time leader in home runs, is leaving New York to join the Baltimore Orioles, league sources told The Athletic. RECIPE OF THE DAY Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. You’re probably not going to cook these fantastic cabbage rolls tonight. The process is a little involved for a Thursday. But read the recipe a couple of times today and, if you’re so moved, make it this weekend, when you can stretch out the preparation and cooking over a lazy afternoon. The filling is tender and lightly spiced, wrapped in cabbage leaves so smooth and pliant they might be made of pasta dough, and baked with a vibrant tomato sauce. Go wild with the dill at the end and serve with mashed potatoes. RYAN COOGLER’S POWER Ryan Coogler Ariel Fisher for The New York Times Few directors have had a better year than Ryan Coogler, writes Kyle Buchanan, our Projectionist columnist. Coogler has cemented his place in the highest tier of blockbuster filmmakers. He had already proved himself an expert steward of franchises with “Creed” and the “Black Panther” movies. Then he wrote “Sinners,” an original crowd-pleaser about twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who open a vampire-plagued juke joint in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. It became the highest-grossing original live-action movie in 15 years. “We would talk about how this movie had to be the sexiest movie any of us had ever made because it was carnal,” Coogler told Kyle. He said he wanted “Sinners” to evoke the feeling you get when you look through family photo albums and discover that your relatives were once vigorous young people, too: “Like, yo, my granddad was hot — no wonder he had 10 kids!” More on culture Sarah Weinman, who writes about mystery novels for The New York Times Book Review, selected the best ones of 2025. Amity Gaige’s “Heartwood,” about a solo female hiker who disappears on the Appalachian Trail, made the list, as did an exciting debut by Victor Suthammanont, “Hollow Spaces.” The best film of the year, according Cahiers du Cinéma, the revered French bible of cinephiles, is “Afternoons of Solitude.” It’s a bullfighting documentary by the Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra that got only a tiny release in North America but is available on streaming platforms, including Mubi. Late night hosts tried to decipher Trump’s off-script speech about cost of living. (The Morning’s most-clicked article yesterday was about the speech.) THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Watch a genre movie. I’m thinking “Good Boy,” Ben Leonberg’s distressing supernatural thriller starring his own dog, a handsome golden retriever named Indy. Beat the winter blues with a SAD lamp. (Alternately, go to Australia, where it’s summery and bright.) Find your father a nice gift for the holidays with these smart suggestions for kindly parental units from Wirecutter. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were illegality and legality. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 14, 2025 Author Members Posted December 14, 2025 December 12, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The weekend is almost here. Before we get there, though: The U.S. issued new sanctions on Venezuela’s leader and its oil industry. Indiana lawmakers rejected a map aimed at adding Republicans in Congress. And rescuers saved a hiker in Utah from quicksand. A drone filmed him. More news is below. But first, I’d like to talk about how hard it is to build big things in America. Clockwise from upper left: Arizona, Penn Station, Beverly Hills and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Loren Elliott for The New York Times, Todd Heisler, Gabriela Bhaskar, Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times American inertia American history is full of transformative industrial, technological and architectural innovations. Think of the Model T assembly line. The electrical grid. The interstate highway system. The Hoover Dam. The moonshot. It’s difficult to think of any recent examples on that scale. That’s because it’s getting harder to build stuff. Politicians can’t agree on what to make, or where or how. Red tape slows everything down. Regulatory approval scares off investors. And local critics resist change. They don’t want to see it unfurl outside their windows. The combination leaves us debilitated. My colleagues wanted to see what those problems looked like on the ground. And they wondered: Can they be overcome? Penn Station Todd Heisler/The New York Times Politicians have been pledging to rebuild North America’s busiest train station for more than 25 years, over the course of five presidencies and four New York State governors. Penn is a widely loathed and hugely important transit hub through which some 600,000 souls pass each day — nearly twice the number of people who use the nation’s busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International. Few would describe the experience as pleasant. It’s dark and overcrowded. Trains are often delayed, and tempers run high. It needs fixing. And yet, my colleague Patrick McGeehan wrote, in every attempt, “progress has been torpedoed by a political rivalry or a powerful billionaire or infighting among transit agencies with their own priorities.” It’s the city versus the state versus the federal government versus private developers, with commuters as the victims every time. “We need a parent to come in here and knock heads between the various entities,” one transportation advocate told him. Housing One subject on which Republicans and Democrats align: The country doesn’t have enough housing. Americans agree. But, they often say, Don’t build on this specific block in this specific neighborhood in this specific city at this specific point in time! Conor Dougherty, who covers housing in California, went to Beverly Hills to see what might be done about that, reporting on a little-known state law that lets developers erect high-density projects in neighborhoods that don’t want them. The builder’s remedy, as the law is called, terrifies small cities like Beverly Hills, where a developer Conor met is using it to create high-density housing. In that developer’s work, Conor found what might be the ultimate impact of the law: housing measured not simply in units, but in units built because of fear of litigation. A decaying highway Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times I live just west of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, part of which is a crumbling 70-year-old triple-cantilevered road. The city has already reduced it by a lane to lessen the weight on the road. But as drivers seek alternatives to the clogged artery and urban planners argue about what to do, standstill traffic plagues surrounding neighborhoods, including my own. My colleagues Winnie Hu, Helmuth Rosales and Marco Hernandez put together this arresting visual story that explains what happened to the expressway and what might be done about it — if only politics, red tape and the neighbors didn’t intrude. (Everyone wants to fix the B.Q.E. Everyone has a different idea about how best to do it.) “The B.Q.E. has just bedeviled and frustrated everybody who’s ever driven on it, looked at it, and worked on it,” Lara Birnback, the head of the Brooklyn Heights Association, told The Times. “It’s like a curse.” Chip factories Huge computer chip factories are rising from an empty expanse of the Sonoran Desert on the northern edges of Phoenix. As my colleague Peter Goodman reports, political leaders cheer them “as insurance against geopolitical turmoil and disasters like pandemics. Whatever happens, the nation will have its own supply of computer chips.” But the company building the plants is not American. It’s Taiwanese. American companies lack the money, the people and the experience to build them. “A tangle of bureaucracy often hinders ambitious visions, sowing confusion, uncertainty and delay,” Peter writes. Even in Phoenix, which will benefit from the plants, workers are in short supply and people are worried. They’re concerned about big buildings, water use, about dangerous chemicals. “Here is part of the explanation for delays at computer chip clusters from New York to Ohio to Texas,” Peter writes. “Here is why companies around the globe are reluctant to make things in the United States, fearing a bewildering array of regulations and trouble finding workers.” A sign of hope? Recently, a kind of anti-inertia platform for a moderate wing of the Democratic Party has emerged, reports Michael Kimmelman, who writes about building and buildings. Its advocates argue, he writes, “that America should increase the supply of housing and upgrade its infrastructure through targeted deregulation.” This platform, should it take root, might do wonders in reducing the amount of red tape and overcoming inertia to make new things. It’s a lot to ask. (Pessimism, of course, plagues us, too.) But Michael notes that there are small, incremental signs in America that we may be coming unstuck. I’ll let Michael take us home: The evidence is not yet in A.I., or in any single, epochal project equivalent to the Golden Gate Bridge, much less in an invention to revolutionize the built world on the level of the internal combustion engine. It is in myriad steps and indicators, like the recent trimming of environmental regulations that have, for years, stalled housing growth in California. Or in the rollback of single-family zoning laws in various cities and states, red and blue, from California to Montana to Maine. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. THE LATEST NEWS Venezuela The tanker seized off Venezuela regularly carried oil from countries under U.S. sanctions, data shows. Seizing more oil tankers could seriously damage the country’s economy. María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuela’s opposition, said she was able to leave the country with the help of the U.S. Politics The Senate deadlocked on proposals to avert rising health care costs, making it likely that Obamacare subsidies will expire at the end of the month. Trump signed an executive order that would stop states from regulating A.I. in favor of one federal framework. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and Trump ally, will run for governor of Minnesota. Immigration A judge ordered the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from immigration custody, saying that the Trump administration had detained him “without lawful authority.” The man accused of killing the political activist Charlie Kirk appeared in court for the first time since his arrest. A grand jury again rejected the Trump administration’s effort to indict Letitia James, the New York attorney general. International In Sofia, Bulgaria. Dimitar Kyosemarliev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Bulgaria’s prime minister resigned after mass protests against government corruption. He had been in office less than a year. Reddit has sued the Australian government over its new policy that bans children under 16 from social media. Economy The S&P 500 reached a record high yesterday. America’s monthly trade deficit fell to its lowest level in five years after Trump’s imposition of sweeping global tariffs, in line with his goals. Other Big Stories Patients taking a new obesity drug developed by Eli Lilly lost more weight than with any drug now on the market, the company reported yesterday. Disney said it would buy a $1 billion stake in OpenAI and bring its characters to Sora, the A.I. company’s short-form video platform. That means users can make videos of themselves singing “Happy Birthday” with Mickey Mouse or swinging light sabers with Luke Skywalker. A DELUGE In Washington State. Grant Hindsley for The New York Times Heavy rains are flooding the Pacific Northwest. Rivers have swollen, soaking residential areas. Homes, cars and gas stations have been submerged. Roads have closed. Residents have fled for safety under “go now” evacuation orders. Here’s what’s happening: The storm has drenched Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Idaho’s northern panhandle. It may spread farther east. Several people were rescued by helicopter after being trapped in their homes. Landslides and flooding have shut down major highways to Vancouver. There’s a high risk of avalanche in areas east of the city. More than 100,000 people in Washington have been ordered to evacuate. The Skagit and Snohomish Rivers, which run through the region, are predicted to crest at record levels. The rain is weakening. Read more about the storms. OPINIONS In Trump’s first term, his poor approval numbers were in spite of the economy. Now they’re because of it, Kristen Soltis Anderson writes. Rising health care spending is killing the American dream, Zack Cooper writes. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Edith Ingasiani and her daughter Blessings in Kenya. Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times She named her Blessings: In Saudi Arabia, where women can be jailed for giving birth outside marriage, a single Kenyan mother promised to get her daughter out — no matter what. Unlikely friends: Some dolphins are leading killer whales to salmon and earning their share of lunch. Your pick: The Morning’s most-read story yesterday was about how late night hosts deciphered Trump’s rambling speech on affordability. TODAY’S NUMBER 62 — That’s the percentage of Americans who own a drip coffee maker, according to the National Coffee Association. It’s an increase of 7 percent since 2020. (Only 11 percent report owning a cold-brew maker, but that’s a 57 percent increase since 2020.) Explore the rest of the coffee grounds. SPORTS Motorsports: NASCAR has settled an antitrust lawsuit. N.B.A.: A pair of Nike Air Ships Michael Jordan worn during his rookie season sold for almost $700,000 at a Sotheby’s auction. RECIPE OF THE DAY Ryan Liebe for The New York Times It’s latke season where I hang out, with loads of competition between family members and friends to see who can make the crispiest, most flavorful discs. My playbook this year: pickle latkes, with strips of julienned dill pickles mixed in with the grated potatoes and onion. The salty-sour pickle notes are beautiful against a dollop of sour cream or apple sauce, or both. Substitute dried potato flakes for the matzo if you’re serving the gluten-free. And mind this note carefully: You want even, consistent heat in your pan so that you can cook the latkes through evenly, without burning the exteriors. THE BEST PERFORMANCES Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst in “Roofman.” Davi Russo/Paramount Pictures We’re deep into the season of best-of lists. One I await eagerly is our critic Wesley Morris’s annual selection of great movie performances in categories that will never receive the attention of the Oscars. Best cigarette acting, for instance (that one went to Tânia Maria in “The Secret Agent”), or best acting in a helmet (Brad Pitt in “F1.”) There’s a best monologue from Delroy Lindo in “Sinners” this year, and a best straight face from Liam Neeson in “The Naked Gun.” How about strongest flex of anti-stardom? That’d be Julia Roberts in “After the Hunt.” I love how Wesley makes his cases. Here he is on Kirsten Dunst in “Roofman,” his choice for rawest single mom. Dunst plays Leigh, a mother who falls for an escaped criminal. “So shockingly instantaneous, so raw is her access to being seduced, to bliss, to heartbreak and protectiveness that I found myself wondering where she goes to find these feelings,” Wesley writes. Explore all the winners here. More on culture For his latest close read of a poem, our critic A.O. Scott takes up the Nobel laureate Louise Glück’s “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson,” published in 1968. It’s a winter poem, only 11 lines, cold until it bursts into flame at the end. Read it and see. As part of its pledge to remove illicit holdings from its collection, the National Museum of Asian Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said yesterday that it was returning three Khmer objects that were likely looted more than 50 years ago during Cambodia’s era of civil upheaval. Late night hosts joked about Trump’s “gold card.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Taylor Swift Lindsey Wasson/Associated Press Relive Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour with a six-part documentary series, “The End of an Era,” about the inner workings of the performances. (Someone in your house may be very into this.) It’s streaming on Disney+. Stop this habit that’s silently ruining your relationship. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was maypole. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Before we go, I heard from a number of you yesterday about how we identified two journalists who reported on the Tate brothers. After I introduced them, I referred to them by their first names, not their last. That’s in line with our house style for newsletters, which is conversational and direct, a style we hope helps introduce you to the humans who produce our news. But some found it jarring, and I’m sorry for that. See you tomorrow. — Sam Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 15, 2025 Author Members Posted December 15, 2025 December 13, 2025 Good morning. The antidote to our increasingly disembodied lives may lie in letting go of our inhibitions and dancing like kids do. María Jesús Contreras Baby steps How fascinating to read this week about the A.I.-generated travel influencers that are taking gigs away from real-life, flesh-and-blood influencers. People whose job it is to take trips to far-flung locales and post about it on social media fear they’re being elbowed out by computer-created personae that can do the job for much less. For those of us who are still in awe that “travel influencer” is a job that exists, for which one might be paid $100,000 or more for a single post about a vacation, the news that this relatively newfangled position may be endangered by artificial intelligence is sort of dizzying. We were just getting accustomed to the fact that we are being “influenced” at all, and now the robots are taking over the task? Ponder this strange screen-born economy long enough and you start craving the real world, a world in which influence comes from the things and people you encounter as your body moves and acts and reacts in space. Thank goodness for an equally intriguing recent story in The Times, by Margaret Fuhrer, about the uninhibited way that children dance. It delivered just the reminder I, and maybe you, needed that there’s excessive delight to be found on the physical plane. Babies and toddlers are un-self-conscious when they dance. They’re spontaneous, present, unconcerned with who’s watching them. This approach “brings us back to our own intelligent bodies, our own basic understanding of what it is to be alive,” a movement therapist told Margaret. “Babies don’t perform movement — they discover it.” Do adults perform movement when they dance? They do. We do. We have no choice — we’ve done it before, so each time we dance we’re re-enacting the remnants of every time we’ve danced previously. We try and fail and try again to catch the rhythm; we think about how we’re being perceived. But what a privilege it is to move, even if it’s awkward, to be embodied and expressing and trying to be responsive to a beat, to be more subject and less object. Social media is, we all know, pure performance — whether you’re an influencer or not. But it’s etheric, as in taking place in the ether. An Instagram post is a conceptual performance, projected images of real action. And the whole point of a social media post is the audience: Who’s looking, who’s watching, what do they think of us? Our posting selves are the very opposite of a child dancing; we’re a million miles away from the grounded reality of “our own intelligent bodies.” The last time I wrote about dancing, I wondered why we don’t dance more and made a commitment to do so. It’s been two years since then, and I’ve half-kept my promise. I’ve tried to “go out dancing” whenever I’ve found willing accomplices — maybe three times in two years. I dance in my building’s elevator at the end of most days; I always have headphones on, and I like the final exertion of energy before arriving and winding down. But it wasn’t until I read Margaret’s story, and watched adults try to follow the unscripted moves of a baby, that I remembered why I’d wanted to dance more in the first place. So much of our movement is just using our bodies like reliable vehicles to get ourselves from one place to another. Dancing is an act of remembering that, once, when we were small, everything was new. Once, we moved our bodies primarily in order to play, express and discover. The more online we become, the farther we drift from what Margaret calls “our earliest soundtrack,” the rhythm that’s in us before we’re born, “the basslike thump-thump of our mother’s heartbeat and the oontz-oontz of her circulating blood.” There’s an old PBS interview with Kurt Vonnegut in which he says: “The moral of the story is, we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize — or they don’t care — is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.” I’m not sure what he meant by “we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore” — maybe he felt, as so many of us do, that dancing is unserious or frivolous. Let’s do it anyway. Let’s remind the “computer people,” which is really all people, ourselves included, that we’re dancing animals, and shake our tail feathers accordingly. THE LATEST NEWS Venezuela Skipper, the oil tanker that the U.S. seized this week. Vantor, via Associated Press The oil tanker seized by the U.S. this week was part of the Venezuelan government’s effort to finance Cuba, according to documents and people inside the Venezuelan oil industry. For Marco Rubio, a primary architect of the U.S. campaign against Venezuela, pushing out Nicolás Maduro could help fulfill another decades-long dream of his: crippling Cuba. The tanker’s seizure may squeeze Venezuela’s government, experts say, but it’s unlikely to significantly disrupt the big business of oil smuggling. The U.S. military commander who initially oversaw the Pentagon’s attacks on boats off Venezuela’s coast retired. Several officials say he had raised concerns about the attacks. Politics The White House this week. Doug Mills/The New York Times The National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit to stop President Trump’s construction of a new White House ballroom. House Democrats released dozens of new images collected as part of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, including photos of Epstein with Trump, Bill Clinton and Woody Allen. The Trump administration is sharing air travelers’ names with immigration officials to find people with deportation orders. The Trump administration is investigating whether Boston’s affordable housing policies prioritized people of color and, in doing so, discriminated against white residents. International The Thai government on Saturday disputed President Trump’s announcement that Thailand and Cambodia had agreed to a cease-fire. Elon Musk is daring Europe to take him on. The billionaire has lashed out after E.U. regulators fined X, his social media site, roughly $140 million. Myanmar’s military bombed a hospital in a rebel-held area, killing 34 people and injuring dozens more. It was the 67th attack on a health care facility in Myanmar this year, according to the W.H.O. Other Big Stories Flooding in Burlington, Wash. Grant Hindsley for The New York Times Heavy flooding in western Washington swamped roads and sent people fleeing to rooftops, but as of last night, no one had died, officials said. Sherrone Moore, who was fired as the University of Michigan’s football coach this week, was arraigned on charges of stalking and home invasion. King Charles III, 77, said doctors plan to scale back his cancer treatments. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV Emma Mackey as the title character in “Ella McCay.” 20th Century Studios “Ella McCay,” the first new film from James L. Brooks in 15 years, shares some DNA with other beloved entries in his filmography. But “Broadcast News” it is not: “This is one weird flick,” our critic writes. With fewer films made on site in Los Angeles, visitors to Hollywood are passing on studio tours. Next month will be the last Sundance in Park City, Utah, before the film festival relocates to Colorado. Expect debuts, reunions and three Charli XCX titles. Video Games Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a role-playing game from France, took home the biggest prizes at this year’s Video Game Awards. The Times’s Zachary Small traveled to Paris to report on how a small team, working with a relatively small budget, made a bold artistic statement with Clair Obscur. Music The swooping interior of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. View Pictures/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images Frank Gehry’s halls and amphitheaters sound as marvelous as they look. The architect, who died this month, had the ear of a passionate fan, our critic Joshua Barone writes. Timbaland’s latest protégée is a pink-haired pop singer called TaTa Taktumi. The producer created her — and her music — with a little help from artificial intelligence. More Culture Why go see “A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” one more time? Tradition and nostalgia, sure. But revisiting these classics also offers an opportunity to reflect on different stages in life. Today is SantaCon, a debaucherous bar-crawl-slash-fund-raiser in New York City. Readers shared their craziest stories of SantaCons past. Zohran Mamdani’s sharp sense of humor was an asset as he ran for mayor of New York City. Maybe it was the result of the improv classes he took in his 20s. This year has been a big one for comedy, our columnist writes: Late-night came roaring back to life; Roy Wood Jr. delivered a must-see special; and Amy Poehler made a must-listen podcast. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. CULTURE CALENDAR ? “Avatar: Fire and Ash” (Friday): There’s a new “Avatar” movie on the way, the third film in James Cameron’s sci-fi fantasy series about the alien moon Pandora. While the original “Avatar” was a cultural tidal wave, the second film, subtitled “The Way of Water,” seemed to make a smaller splash. But it was still a box-office hit, bringing in more than $2 billion globally. The new film, “Fire and Ash,” was nominated for a Golden Globe in “cinematic and box office achievement” — interesting, considering it’s not even out yet. Perhaps the jury simply assumed that anything with “Avatar” in the title was bound to make a lot of money. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Aya Brackett for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Tomato sauce When was the last time you simmered a big pot of classic tomato sauce? Samin Nosrat’s recipe hits all the right notes: hearty, full of onions and garlic and plenty of olive oil, and spiced with basil and red chile flakes. It does involve a fair amount of chopping (all those alliums) and over an hour of simmering to make. But when tossed with your favorite pasta and maybe a meatball or two, it will be worth every moment. And the recipe makes enough for dinner tonight plus extra to freeze for up to three months. It’s a boon for your future self — and your current one, too. REAL ESTATE Kyle Weekes and Nigel Campbell. Clark Hodgin for The New York Times The Hunt: A dancer and a vocalist looked for a place to put down roots in New York with space to entertain guests. Which home did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $4 million in California: A compound in Ojai, a contemporary home in Los Angeles or a Spanish-style house in Santa Barbara. Small scale: Frank Gehry was known for his museums and concert halls. But the small bungalow he called home was also a masterpiece. LIVING Click ‘yes’ on the dress: Sarah Diamond, a Times reporter, let thousands of people on the internet choose her wedding gown. Vows: She’s in Gaza. He’s in Cairo. Separated by a closed border, they married remotely. Tripped up: You may be surprised to learn the little-known (and sometimes nonsensical) rules that govern air travel. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter The best stocking stuffers Stocking stuffers are often the final piece of the gift-giving puzzle. Yet this assortment of small gifts needn’t be scraped together during an 11th-hour mad dash to the drugstore. Petite presents can be as meaningful, thoughtful and memorable as the big stuff. The best stocking stuffers for kids — many of which would make great small Hanukkah gifts, too — range from the classics, like socks and lip balm, to the whimsical, like temporary tattoos and bath bombs. For the grown-ups, seek out more unusual items that have the potential to spark a little joy and last beyond Christmas morning. Our favorite stocking stuffers for adults run the gamut from the lovely (a tiny, colorful set of bud vases) to the practical (rose gold nose hair trimmer, anyone?). GAME OF THE WEEK Mikal Bridges of the Knicks shoots over the Magic’s Desmond Bane. Wendell Cruz/Imagn Images, via Reuters Connect New York Knicks vs. Orlando Magic, N.B.A. Cup semifinals: A few years back, the N.B.A. introduced a midseason tournament modeled after those of European soccer leagues. While some players initially bristled at the idea, the tournament has steadily grown more popular. “I think it’s a perfect shot in the arm at this point in the early start of the season,” Chris Finch, the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, told The Athletic recently. And this semifinal matchup has some juice. The Knicks have the top-rated offense in the East, and they’ve torn through most teams they have faced — except the Magic, who are responsible for the two worst losses of the Knicks’ season. Both teams are among the best in the conference, and there’s a good chance that they meet in the playoffs. This game could offer a preview of how they’ll fare when the pressure is on. Tonight at 5:30 p.m. Eastern on Prime Video For more: The most divisive part of the N.B.A. Cup? The gaudy, Technicolor courts. The Athletic ranked them here. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were analogizing and gazillion. 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. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 15, 2025 Author Members Posted December 15, 2025 December 14, 2025 By The Morning Team Good morning. Today, we’re covering two shootings. One just occurred at Bondi Beach, one of Australia’s most famous destinations. The gunmen targeted Jews during an event for the first night of Hanukkah, officials said. The second was at Brown University, where a shooter opened fire inside a classroom yesterday, killing two people and injuring nine others. The police spent all night searching for a suspect, and they just announced that a person of interest was in custody. In Bondi, Sydney, Australia. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times On Bondi Beach They were gathering on the first night of Hanukkah. In Sydney, Australia, shooters targeted a Jewish gathering on the beach and killed at least 11 people, officials said. At least one gunman is dead and another is in custody. The authorities called it a terrorist attack. “This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” said Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister. “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian,” he added. Jews had gathered near the beach with their families. A mother with a young baby said bubbles floated in the air and music played. Then the gunmen, wearing black, emerged from a small silver hatchback and began firing into the crowd, according to a witness. At least 11 people were injured, two of whom were police officers. The police later found what they believed to be improvised explosive devices in a nearby vehicle. Videos from the scene show people fleeing from the busy beach, a half-mile crescent of sand, as the sun set. Panicked people sprinted, jumped over cars and scaled concrete walls, many pulling their children along. Dozens took shelter in shops and restaurants. A photographer who was documenting the event hid behind a parking meter and said a shooter had left him with a gash on his rib. “It was just carnage,” he said. The shooting is the latest in a series of antisemitic attacks in Australia that intensified last year, when arsonists targeted a Jewish business and a synagogue. The violence has unnerved many in the country, which has the world’s highest concentration of Holocaust survivors after Israel. Israel’s foreign minister said Australia’s government must “come to its senses” after countless warnings about antisemitism. Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial center, described the attack as “both heartbreaking and alarming.” Shootings are rare in Australia, a country with one of the lowest gun-related death rates in the developed world. This story is still developing, and you can follow our live coverage here. At Brown University In Providence, R.I. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times Now we’re going to Rhode Island. A gunman opened fire in a classroom at Brown yesterday, killing two people and injuring nine others. The attacker escaped onto the streets of Providence, and hundreds of police officers spent the night searching in alleys and parked cars. The police just announced that they had detained a person of interest. The school lifted its lockdown early this morning. The shooting occurred during a final exam review session for an economics class. The Times spoke with the teaching assistant who led the review session, Joseph Oduro. He described a harrowing scene as the gunman, wearing a mask and carrying a rifle, burst into the lecture hall. The man shouted something Oduro could not make out and started shooting, he said, describing how he hid behind a desk with some students. The police escorted people out of campus buildings late into the night, while some students packed into an athletic center. At least two of the Brown University students who were on campus when a deadly shooting unfolded there have survived school shootings before. THE LATEST NEWS Syria In Syria. Delil Souleiman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Three Americans were killed in central Syria in an attack by a lone gunman, U.S. officials said. President Trump called the assault an “ISIS attack against the U.S.” and vowed to retaliate. The attack exposes some of the challenges Syria’s leader faces in unifying the country and rebuilding international support, analysts say. Politics The Trump administration’s change in crypto enforcement policies has benefited the industry, including companies that had ties to the president, a Times investigation found. A federal court ruled that the Trump administration must end a National Guard deployment in Los Angeles by tomorrow. The C.I.A. refuses to discuss a nuclear-powered generator that a team of climbers left in the Himalayas during a secret mission in 1965. The Treasury Department introduced coins celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. The coins did not include planned designs featuring abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement. Israel The Israeli military said it killed one of Hamas’s top commanders in Gaza yesterday. Hamas called the attack a violation of the cease-fire. Rainstorms that battered Gaza recently flooded more than 200 displacement sites, affecting at least 100,000 Palestinians, a U.N. office said. More International News Maria Kolesnikova, a Belarusian opposition leader, with other former prisoners. Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War Belarus freed more than 100 prisoners, including two opposition leaders and a Nobel laureate, as the U.S. announced that it would lift sanctions on potash fertilizer, one of the country’s main exports. Six U.N. peacekeepers were killed when a drone fired on their base in Sudan. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Netflix wants to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Is this good for movies? No. When Hollywood studios monopolize, it comes at the expense of competitors and moviegoers alike. “Re-establishing vigorous competition throughout the industry will bring prices down for consumers, give viewers more choices and keep movie theaters alive,” Alex Jacquez writes for MarketWatch. Yes. Warner Bros. under Netflix would look less like MGM under Amazon — a diminished version of itself — and more like Pixar under Disney. Netflix “needs Warner operating at full strength and has every incentive to preserve and expand the studio’s capabilities,” Josh Harlan writes for The Wall Street Journal. FROM OPINION Illustration by Alvaro Dominguez/The New York Times Trump pardoned a politician facing bribery charges, and Hakeem Jeffries supported the move. It’s a sign that Democrats may be willing to join Trump’s era of corruption, J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston write. Activism has no place in schools because it is incompatible with education, Leighton Woodhouse writes. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Camille McOuat for The New York Times. Chocolate heaven: Culinary legends and award-winning upstarts are turning Paris into a contender for the title of the world’s greatest city for chocolate. Medical marijuana: The benefits of cannabis are often weak or inconclusive, a review of 15 years of research found. Book worn: Kids rarely read full books anymore — not even in English class, where they’re often assigned just one or two per year, The Times found. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about a couple’s search for a new home in New York. SPORTS College football: The Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza won the Heisman Trophy yesterday, becoming the first Hoosiers player to win the award. Rivalry: Navy, ranked No. 22, defeated Army 17-16 in the service academies’ annual football showdown. BOOK OF THE WEEK By Elisabeth Egan “Mona’s Eyes,” by Thomas Schlesser: The setup for this novel, Barnes & Noble’s book of the year, is deceptively simple: A 10-year-old girl embarks on a yearlong art appreciation adventure with her grandfather in Paris. Each Wednesday they visit a different masterpiece — at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou — learning lessons along the way about beauty, imagination, creativity and one another. But simmering beneath these quiet revelations are questions about connection and vision, ones that prove relevant across generations. Translated from French by Hildegarde Serle, Schlesser’s heartfelt novel is an objet d’art unto itself, with all 52 sculptures and paintings appearing on a foldout dust jacket. More on books Looking for the best thrillers of 2025? Start here. And here are the best mysteries of the year. THE INTERVIEW Joe Manchin, Tina Smith and Jeff Flake. Philip Montgomery for The New York Times By Lulu Garcia-Navarro The Interview is doing something a little different this week: a round-table conversation about the state of the Senate with three lawmakers who decided to leave the chamber at different points in the Trump era, and who we hoped would now feel freer to share their true thoughts and feelings. The conversation includes Jeff Flake, a Republican who represented Arizona for 18 years; Joe Manchin, who represented West Virginia, first as a Democrat and later as an independent; and Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat who announced this year that she wouldn’t be seeking re-election. I want to start by asking you all to give me a word or a sentence that describes the state you think the Senate is in right now. Tina Smith: Broken. Jeff Flake: Retreat. The presidency, just by virtue of the system, gains more power over time. But what has been frustrating is to see the Senate just willingly give up Article I authority. Joe Manchin: Abdication. They’ve abdicated their responsibilities. The Senate is the most unusual body in the world. Our framers designed it to be that way, and it was ingrained in me that the filibuster is the holy grail, keeping us talking and working and becoming friends. They’ve abdicated that type of responsibility. Those are all pretty bleak words. Manchin: You want us to call them cowards? I want you to say what you think. Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Paul Kooiker for The New York Times Read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Get a better workout while you’re skiing using three simple techniques. Cook up a dazzling dinner on the cheap. Your guests will be impressed — and they’ll never know how much you saved. Set up a table of pies, cakes and pastries for your dessert holiday party. (It’ll be better than a regular old holiday party!) Treat your taste buds to cutout holiday cookies using these tips. MEAL PLAN Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Do you want your dinner saucy or a little creamy? Rich or light? Sometimes the answer, unhelpfully, is all of the above. Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter has you covered with superb recipes for chicken Florentine, ginger-scallion steamed fish, and more. Plus, a reminder that latkes can, in fact, be dinner, especially with smoked salmon and sour cream. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was groundout. Can you put eight historical events — including the disco ball, Mile 0 and the first sharks — 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. Editors’ note: Yesterday’s newsletter was missing its byline. It was by our regular Saturday writer, Melissa Kirsch. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 16, 2025 Author Members Posted December 16, 2025 December 15, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning and welcome to a new week, the last official one of fall. We woke up to the news that the director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were found dead in their Los Angeles home yesterday afternoon. The police are investigating the deaths as “an apparent homicide.” Read his obituary. We have more on that below, as well as a deep look at the global fertility industry. But first, the latest from Brown University and Bondi Beach, the sites of two shootings over the weekend. In Providence, R.I. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times At Brown University There’s been a setback in Rhode Island. The police released a person of interest they had detained after a shooter killed two people at Brown University. They said they did not have enough evidence to connect the person to the shooting. So now, the search continues. The mayor of Providence said that officials didn’t know if the attacker was still in the city. “Obviously we have a murderer out there,” the state attorney general said. The police released a video of a suspect, but footage is minimal. “There just weren’t a lot of cameras in that Brown building,” the attorney general also said. The shooting occurred during a study session for an exam in the school’s engineering and physics building. Students shared more details about their 12 hours of fear in lockdown, as hordes of law-enforcement officers descended on the Ivy League campus. Exams are canceled, and university officials told students they were free to go home. Follow updates on the search here. At Bondi Beach A memorial at Bondi Beach. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times As Australia reels from a mass shooting at its most famous beach, we’ve learned more about the suspects. A father and his son targeted Jews at a Hanukkah celebration and killed at least 15 people, Australian officials said. The older man died after being shot by officers. At least 38 people remain hospitalized from injuries. It was an act of terrorism, the authorities said. But they did not give details about the suspects’ ideology or motive. Neither gunman was known to have any history of previous criminal offenses, officials said. They plan to bring criminal charges against the surviving suspect. (See our maps and videos of how the shooting unfolded.) More on the suspects: The father had a recreational hunting license and owned a gun, the police said. He was an immigrant who came to Australia in 1998 on a student visa and stayed on other visas, officials said. It was unclear what country he was from. The son is an Australian citizen. The threat to Jews: Members of Australia’s Jewish community said they had warned the government of rising antisemitism. “We feel very let down,” said Ahron Eisman, 37, who said his next door neighbor was killed. “We’ve been saying it’s only a matter of time.” The victims: The victims’ names have not been released, but we know a Holocaust survivor, a devoted rabbi of the Bondi community and a French citizen are among the dead. Read more about them. A hero: Finally, the bystander who tackled one of the gunmen was a man named Ahmed el Ahmed, the police said. He is recovering from injuries in a hospital. “That man is a genuine hero,” one official said. “And I’ve got no doubt that there are many, many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.” If you haven’t seen it already, watch the video of el Ahmed (The Times verified it’s real). And read the latest. Illustration by Nicole Rifkin The cost of children Nearly 200 million people every year struggle with infertility. Some estimates say it touches one in six adults. That’s a lot of potential customers for a strange global marketplace — one that often operates in legal gray areas and moves from nation to nation to dodge regulations and meet demand: If you want a baby and have enough money, almost anything is possible. As my colleague Sarah A. Topol reported from the Caucasus and elsewhere: This has led to all kinds of elaborate arrangements for the creation of children. In Georgia, intended parents from China can import Ukrainian eggs or semen from Denmark, create embryos in Tbilisi and use Thai wombs to bear and birth babies before bringing a child home to Shanghai. Sarah spent six months reporting the tale of Thai women who traveled 4,000 miles to become surrogates. They believed they’d be paid large sums. Instead, they experienced a nightmare. A last resort People who become surrogates in the global fertility industry are often in precarious financial situations. Sarah spoke to one of them, a 24-year-old Thai woman named Eve. She had worked in construction, restaurants, security and as a masseuse. She was working as a motorcycle delivery driver when her father was hospitalized and her family’s life fell apart. Pursued by loan sharks, they stopped sleeping at home. One day, Eve saw a Facebook post: I’m looking for a woman to work in Georgia. Legally. Income 500,000-530,000 baht. Age range: 20 to 35. The work, she discovered, was surrogacy, which she’d only vaguely heard of, but which sounded helpful to others. More important, she thought, it would pay well enough to clear her family’s debt. Soon Eve landed in Tbilisi. She surrendered her passport to the Chinese people who had paid for her trip and installed her in a derelict hotel. They gave her fertility medication to prepare her for an embryo transfer. It was cold. There were many house rules. The doctors wouldn’t talk to her. She learned only this: If she wanted to leave, she should pay back the cost of her travel. If she didn’t have the money to do that, she could sell her eggs. The moving market Wildly differing regulations and prices mean that intended parents are often incentivized to travel across borders. The destinations change all the time, as nations take new or different views of what’s called assisted reproductive technologies. India was the hub of commercial surrogacy until 2012, Sarah reports, when it started to regulate the practice in response to reports of abused surrogates, sick babies and mixed-up embryos. Later, the hub moved to Thailand, Mexico and Nepal — all of which experienced scandals, too. By 2016, all three countries had banned surrogacy. Illustration by Nicole Rifkin The market also evolved in Russia, where it was extremely popular with Chinese parents until Moscow shut it down. (China is a huge player on the buy side of the fertility market, Sarah reports. Between 67 and 133 million people there might make use of assisted reproductive technologies.) From Russia it moved to Ukraine and, after Russia invaded the country in 2022, to tiny Georgia. The rush on Georgia was overwhelming: The country simply did not have enough wombs, so clinics and agencies began importing them. On any night in Tbilisi, it’s possible to see clusters of heavily pregnant women — from Kenya, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Ukraine — treating themselves to a meal from their regional restaurant or going to the supermarket. Whac-a-Mole There are, in fact, ethical guidelines for commercial surrogacy. They’re meant to protect the health, autonomy and rights of aspiring parents and the people who carry their babies. There’s meant to be psychological evaluation and counseling in addition to health screenings. Also: “informed consent,” which includes letting surrogates know about all the risks; compensation regardless of what happens in the pregnancy; legal representation for the surrogates and for the people paying them; health insurance and postpartum care; compensation for lost wages; and more. Ethical surrogacy is expensive, though, and inexhaustible demand means that the market can always move to new, less-regulated countries. Today, these include Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, Nigeria and Kyrgyzstan, among other places. Industry observers even have a name for it, Sarah reports: Whac-a-Mole surrogacy. Whac-a-Mole surrogacy doesn’t bother with those ethical guidelines, and the company that brought Eve and many others to Georgia didn’t follow them. For “traveling surrogates” like Eve, there are precious few protections at all. Eve, who Sarah interviewed extensively, eventually escaped her confinement in Tbilisi with the help of a group that works with survivors of human trafficking. Please read all of Sarah’s harrowing story. THE LATEST NEWS War in Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Volodymyr Zelensky said he would give up hopes of joining NATO, at least for now, in exchange for security guarantees. Zelensky made the announcement before a meeting with American negotiators, who are seeking a peace deal to end the war. Negotiations are set to continue today. Jimmy Lai Jimmy Lai Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy media tycoon, was convicted by a Hong Kong court on national security charges. He could face life in prison. Lai was a refugee from mainland China and a child laborer who rose to be the owner of an apparel empire. He used his wealth to back pro-democracy protests and create a popular newspaper in Hong Kong that regularly challenged China’s ruling Communist Party. Read more about his life. More International News A conservative candidate won decisively in Chile’s presidential election. It’s a victory for the global far-right movement. In Syria, the gunman who killed three Americans was a member of Syria’s security forces slated for dismissal over his extremist views, officials said. American officials have paused a trade deal with Britain over disagreements about food safety and taxes on digital services. Politics Bill and Hillary Clinton Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Bill and Hillary Clinton are fighting a subpoena to testify before a House committee about Jeffrey Epstein. They could face contempt proceedings if they don’t appear. Republicans in Congress have accused Washington, D.C.’s police department of lowering its crime statistics by reclassifying certain incidents as lesser charges. T.S.A. is providing the names of all air travelers to immigration agents to aid their deportation efforts. Business Roomba maker iRobot filed for bankruptcy. Investment in China slowed drastically in November, the latest indication that the country was headed for its first annual investment decline in three decades. OPINIONS Western leaders should stand up for liberal values and pressure China to free Jimmy Lai, writes Mark Clifford. Here is a column by David French on the dangers of viewing everything as a crisis. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more. MORNING READS Weston Wei Travel 101: Spotting these red flags in an Airbnb listing can help you avoid a vacation disaster. Work friend: My boss got too drunk at the holiday party. Help! Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about cheap holiday dinner party ideas. Metropolitan Diary: Two readers, same book. TODAY’S NUMBER 27 — That is the number of game-day balls allotted to teams in the National Football League. Twelve are denoted primary balls and 12 are kept as backup. There are three kicking balls. The N.F.L. can fine players for throwing them into the stands. For this season, the first offense is $8,114 and the second is $13,911. SPORTS N.F.L.: The Kansas City Chiefs will miss the playoffs for the first time since 2014 after a 16-13 loss to the Los Angeles Chargers. The team’s star quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, left the game with a knee injury. College football: Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia apologized for criticizing Heisman Trophy voters after he lost the award to Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza. RECIPE OF THE DAY Kelly Marshall for The New York Times There’s a spicy West African fried pepper sauce at the base of Yewande Komolafe’s lovely new recipe for one-pan spicy chicken thighs and mushrooms. But it’s not alone. There’s miso in there, too, and oil-packed anchovies. The combination delivers an explosion of umami — that deep, meaty taste beyond sweet, spicy, sour and salty — that enhances the chicken and mushrooms considerably. Add a splash of vinegar at the end to bring everything into focus and serve over rice with lots of basil. STAR POWER The New York Times We live in an era of niche culture, algorithmic bubbles and online echo chambers, writes Maya Salam, a culture reporter. In 2025, she found 10 performers who managed to rise out of the pigeonholes to become true breakout stars. Please meet them. More on culture After 25 years, Elaina Richardson is stepping down as the president of Yaddo. She increased the storied arts residency’s endowment to $38 million from $8 million and upgraded the 400-acre retreat and application process. “The days when one would be the only person of color at Yaddo are over,” the writer James Hannaham told our reporter, Elisabeth Egan. Many of America’s regional theaters are having a hard time these days. They’re putting on fewer shows, employing fewer people and running at a deficit more often than before the pandemic. But not all of them. Michael Paulson, who covers theater, reports that some are booming. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Daniel Craig John Wilson/Netflix Watch an ensemble scene from “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.” Exercise in the cold, but be careful about it — we have some tips. Fill your stockings with these terrific small-gift ideas from the curious elves at Wirecutter. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was enviable. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 17, 2025 Author Members Posted December 17, 2025 December 16, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. Lots of violence today. The gunmen in the Bondi Beach shooting were motivated by ISIS, the Australian prime minister said. The suspects had recently traveled to the southern Philippines, where ISIS is still active. In Rhode Island, the police are still searching for the shooter in the killing of two students at Brown University. They have released new footage of a suspect. The police arrested the son of the director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, after they were found stabbed to death. Let’s start in Bondi Beach. At Bondi Beach. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times Gun control Australia vowed yesterday to enact even stricter gun laws as it began mourning the victims of its worst mass shooting in almost 30 years. The police accused a father and a son of killing 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach. The Australian response to mass shootings stands in contrast to America’s reaction. In Australia, consensus forms quickly. That’s one reason its rate of gun violence is so low. A different outlook Australia’s approach first took shape after a deadly shootout between rival motorcycle gangs in New South Wales in 1984. In response, Parliament required that anyone applying for a firearm license have a “good reason” for requesting one. But the nation’s most aggressive move against guns came after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, when a gunman attacked a tourist town in the state of Tasmania, killing 35 people. It was the deadliest attack in modern Australian history. It took the government just 12 days to ban semiautomatic weapons, to start a mandatory buyback program that took a fifth of firearms from public circulation and to introduce licenses that would stop people considered unfit from buying weapons. As a result, Australia has one of the lowest gun homicide rates per capita in the world. Other restrictions followed. In 2002, after a student killed two peers at Monash University in Victoria with pistols he’d gotten as a member of a shooting club, the government introduced the National Handgun Agreement, which led to mandatory buybacks for semiautomatic and large-caliber handguns. In 2014, after a gunman held customers and employees of a cafe in Sydney hostage with an illegal shotgun, the premier of New South Wales announced a tightening of laws governing their possession. The coming clampdown Still, the number of guns held legally in Australia has risen steadily for more than two decades. At four million guns, it now exceeds the number before the 1996 crackdown, according to the Australia Institute. And despite tougher laws and stricter enforcement, the police say the older suspect in the Bondi Beach attack had held a firearm license since 2015, along with six legally registered weapons. If there were flags on him, they do not appear to have been red. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his cabinet had agreed to strengthen gun laws and work on a national firearm register. They’ll look at the number of weapons permitted by gun licenses and how long those permits remain valid. “People’s circumstances can change,” Albanese told reporters. “People can be radicalized over a period of time. Licenses should not be in perpetuity.” You can read the latest updates here. Now, let's see what else is happening in the world. THE REINER FAMILY Rob and Nick Reiner. Laura Cavanaugh/FilmMagic, via Getty Images The police arrested Nick Reiner, the son of the director Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, on suspicion of murdering his parents. They were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home. Charges could come today. Follow the latest updates. The night before the Reiners were found, Rob and his son went to a holiday party hosted by Conan O’Brien. An attendee reported seeing them shouting at each other. Nick, 32, had struggled with drug addiction since he was a teenager and once estimated he had been in treatment 18 times. Rob Reiner’s career spanned decades and gave us some of the most memorable films of the late 20th century, including “When Harry Met Sally … ” and “The Princess Bride.” He was unusually active in politics, even for Hollywood, and was an outspoken critic of President Trump. Trump mocked the news of his death yesterday, writing on social media that Reiner had died “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” His comments prompted a rare backlash from some MAGA-aligned Republicans. Late night hosts also discussed his comments. The Times’s critics wrote about Reiner’s career: Alissa Wilkinson on the devotion Reiner showed to causes he believed in, as seen in his courtroom drama “A Few Good Men.” James Poniewozik on Reiner’s breakout role as an actor on “All in the Family,” and what it got right about the political direction of the country. THE LATEST NEWS Brown University Shooting Officers went door to door in Providence, R.I., searching for footage of a suspect in the Brown shooting. They released several new video clips last night. See them here. With no information about the killer’s motives or whereabouts, some schools in the Providence area have canceled classes. The victims were Ella Cook, 19, from Alabama, a gifted pianist; and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, 18, an immigrant from Uzbekistan who dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon. Ukraine Peace Talks The U.S., Ukraine and Europe agreed to guarantee the future security of Ukraine. They’re revising a peace proposal to end the war. The question of where to draw a new Ukraine-Russia border, though, remains unresolved. More International News Jimmy Lai Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times Jimmy Lai spent decades criticizing China’s rulers. After a court convicted him of national security crimes, some say his case is a reflection of what Hong Kong has become. The White House says it is trying to curb drug trafficking from Venezuela. But behind the scenes, it’s trying to gain access to the country’s vast oil reserves. The family of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi, says that the Iranian authorities severely beat her recently. The E.U. is providing humanitarian supplies to Sudan, but aid groups are blocked from delivering it to those most in need. Politics A boat in the Pacific. U.S. Southern Command The United States struck three more boats it said were smuggling drugs in the Pacific, killing eight people. Trump sued the BBC for $10 billion over a documentary about the Jan. 6 riot. The BBC has apologized for certain edits in the film, and two top executives resigned over the controversy last month. A Times investigation into Jeffrey Epstein reveals that much of his wealth came from scams, theft and lies. The U.S. plans to deport a Chinese citizen who recorded rare evidence of the mass detention of Uyghurs. Trump Family Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson Doug Mills/The New York Times Trump told attendees at a White House holiday party that his eldest son, Donald Jr., was engaged to Bettina Anderson, a Palm Beach socialite. The private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, said it was withdrawing from a Trump-branded real estate deal in Serbia. Hours before, four Serbian officials were charged with corruption in connection with the deal. Auto Industry Ford said it would scale back electric-vehicle production plans. Volkswagen, under pressure from U.S. tariffs, will close a plant in Germany for the first time in company history. OPINIONS Times Opinion shares 13 strange, unusual and moving gift ideas that cost (almost) nothing. “We’ve been let down”: Members of Gen Z discuss the military, America’s place in the world and their generation. The Times Sale starts now: 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 Luke and Laura on “General Hospital.” ABC Photo Archives/Disney A daytime superstar: Anthony Geary, the actor best known for portraying Luke Spencer on the popular soap opera “General Hospital,” has died at 78. In the early 1980s, when his character married Laura Webber (Genie Francis), it became the most-watched episode of a daytime drama in history. (I cut class to see it.) What gives you hope? Cynicism is spreading. As we head into 2026, we want to know what makes you think the future can improve. Tell us here. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was to a video of the bystander who tackled one of the Bondi Beach shooters. TODAY’S NUMBER 7,252 — That is the soaring number of admissions for drug withdrawals in Philadelphia in the first nine months of this year. A new form of fentanyl mixed with medetomidine, a veterinary sedative, is helping drive the surge. The drug leaves some patients mute, appearing unaware as they defecate on the floor or vomit on nurses. SPORTS N.F.L.: The future of the Chiefs star Travis Kelce is in question. Will he retire after this season? College soccer: Washington won the N.C.A.A. men’s championship over N.C. State in overtime. RECIPE OF THE DAY Julia Gartland for The New York Times I like these holiday citrus shortbread cookies for a number of reasons, and perhaps mostly because the dough benefits from a long chill in the refrigerator. That means you can make it tonight, allow the flavors to meld and then bake the cookies off for decorating tomorrow or the next day, or the day after that — the dough will last in the fridge, tightly wrapped, for about a week. The results are super buttery, with a floral orange-zest sparkle, and benefit from a glossy lemon glaze. Roll out thick for tender cookies, or thin for crisp. They’re not too sweet! A SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL Jane Austen Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England Jane Austen was born on this day in 1775, the seventh of eight children of a British clergyman and his wife. She read voraciously, wrote inexhaustibly, never married and died at age 41. Her six novels changed the face of literature. To mark her 250th birthday, the Austen-industrial complex has roared into high production, with festivals, parades, museum exhibitions, concerts and all manner of merchandise for sale. The Book Review examined film adaptations of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” to ask: Who is the definitive Mr. Darcy? And they put together a quiz to test your knowledge of all things Austen. More on culture The New York Times Our critics picked the best albums of 2025. Click the video above to watch them discuss their choices. Holiday music almost invariably looks backward, so new standards are rare. (The last was Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” in 1994, and it didn’t top the charts until 25 years later.) Still, artists from every corner of the pop-music ecosystem continue to try to break through. This year’s music offerings include tracks from Luke Bryan, Kylie Minogue, Brad Paisley, Gwen Stefani and … Tyra Banks. Explore them. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Michael B. Jordan, left, and David Letterman on “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.” Courtesy of Netflix Watch David Letterman’s “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” tonight on Netflix. The actor Michael B. Jordan, who most recently starred in “Sinners,” helps kick off the show’s sixth season. Stick to your workout routine while you’re traveling with these tips. Give yourself the gift of great carry-on luggage, with recommendations from Wirecutter’s champions of the overhead bin. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was guffawing. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 18, 2025 Author Members Posted December 18, 2025 December 17, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning from the London newsroom of The New York Times. A few updates on the terrible stories from the weekend: Nick Reiner, a son of the director Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, was charged with murdering his parents. His sister found their father’s body, and we have more details here. The 24-year-old suspect in the Bondi Beach attack woke from a coma. He was charged with murder and terrorism. And more than three days after the shooting at Brown University, investigators still don’t have a suspect or a motive. We’ll get to more news below. But I’d like to start today with the promise and peril of robots that look like humans. In China. Jade Gao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Mr. Robot Scientists and entrepreneurs are working tirelessly toward a strange goal: robots that look like us. Why, if we just want them to unburden our lives, do we need that? It’s a question for philosophers as much as for inventors. But you can see the market appeal. A robot vacuum cleaner can’t climb stairs to clean an upstairs room. A robot arm that loads boxes in a factory can’t make you a cocktail. You’d hate to arrive for a hair appointment and see that your colorist resembles a spider made of Legos and wire, even if its work is top-tier. Humanoid robots can already do some humanlike things, of course. They can dance and run. They can play household concierge. Some can almost load a dishwasher. But they’re clumsy right now. (You broke a glass!) They’re also hard to instruct. Think about that hair appointment. The work requires a lot of manual dexterity on the part of the stylist. But as Tim Fernholz reported recently, dexterity is difficult to teach. “Humans don’t have a language for gathering, storing and communicating data about touch, the way we do for language and imagery,” he wrote. “Our fingers’ remarkable sensing ability collects all kinds of information that we can’t easily translate for machines.” A crowded market Chang W. Lee/The New York Times None of which has stopped China from trying to use the robots to drive economic growth. “Public and private investors spent over $5 billion this year on start-ups making humanoid robots” in China, my colleagues Meaghan Tobin and Xinyun Wu report today — “the same amount spent in the last five years combined.” They have advantages over their competitors in the West. With the backing of the government, they can draw on China’s gigantic manufacturers to fabricate top-quality parts. They can build a lot of robots. But those robots are not about to revolutionize your life, Meaghan and Xinyun write. For one thing, there are too many players — more than 150 Chinese companies are jockeying to lead the market. The Chinese government warned last month of a robot bubble, noting a lot of “highly repetitive products.” And while those products can act somewhat like humans and even perform a few basic tasks, they are not yet anything like skilled human workers. Humanoid robots don’t react well to unpredictable situations. That makes them dangerous. The pioneering roboticist Rodney Brooks told Tim that he wouldn’t get within three feet of a humanoid bot. It’s not just that you can’t reason with a robot (yet). Let’s say one of them loses its balance — that’s a when, not an if, according to Brooks. The powerful machinery that can make that robot useful in the home, office or factory floor could suddenly turn into a scary liability: thrashing mechanical arms or legs, say, pounding into human flesh. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. THE LATEST NEWS Reiner Killings A massage therapist came to the Reiners’ home and called the couple’s 28-year-old daughter, Romy, when there was no answer at the gate. Read more about how the Reiners were found. If he is convicted, Nick Reiner could face the death penalty. Michelle Obama said that she and Barack Obama were planning to have dinner with the Reiners on the day they were found dead. She called them “decent, courageous” people. Bondi Beach The coffin of Rabbi Eli Schlanger. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times The funeral was held for the rabbi killed in the attack. The synagogue was filled to capacity. It was the first funeral of the 15 killed in the shooting. A Holocaust survivor and a 10-year-old girl were among the victims. Australia’s prime minister visited Ahmed el Ahmed, the man who tackled one of the gunmen, in the hospital and called him “a true Australian hero.” Muslims in Australia fear an Islamophobic backlash in response to the attack. As Australians watched mass shootings in America, many expressed pride in their country’s strict gun control measures. Now, many are asking what happened. More International News President Trump said that the United States would stop some oil tankers from going to and from Venezuela. In Britain, a man who rammed his car into a soccer parade was sentenced to more than 21 years in prison. A new proposal to end the war in Ukraine includes European troops inside the country, according to officials familiar with the plan. Susie Wiles Interview Susie Wiles Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times In interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, acknowledged “score settling” behind Trump’s prosecutions of his political opponents. She also said Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality” and called JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist.” (Read the full Vanity Fair story here.) Wiles criticized the article as a “disingenuously framed hit piece.” Trump and his top aides rushed to her defense. More Politics Trump restricted travel from more countries. The list now includes people from Syria and South Sudan as well as those with documents issued by the Palestinian Authority. Speaker Mike Johnson ruled out a vote on extending Obamacare subsidies. Some Republicans in vulnerable districts had pushed for the extension. Other Big Stories In Alaska. Josh Koch/U.S. Geological Survey Record-setting temperatures in the Arctic are turning Alaska’s rivers orange and red with toxic runoff. The unemployment rate rose to a four-year high last month. Economists say it’s a warning sign for the labor market. U.S. hospitals can earn up to $2 million when an international patient gets an organ transplant. A Times investigation found that such patients usually receive those transplants faster than the Americans do. The diary of one of Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriends, obtained by The Times, shows how he treated women. FIRE ALARM A fire department in Washington State. M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times I have a few friends who volunteer for small-town fire departments on Long Island, in New York. They work on teams to respond to structure and brush fires. They respond to car accidents and medical emergencies. A few years ago, a friend of mine was swept off a sandbar while fishing alone in the middle of the night and could not make it back to shore. He managed to use his cellphone to call for help. (Amazingly.) Volunteer firefighters took the department’s fireboat and found him drifting on the tide in pitch darkness, then pulled him to safety. There are a lot of volunteer firefighters — more than half a million across the United States. Some work with professional departments. But more than 80 percent of all fire departments in the United States are run either entirely or mostly by volunteers. And they operate on very slim budgets — largely funded by local taxes, fund-raising and the occasional grant. On Long Island, as in many places, that means boot drives, where firefighters stand in traffic in their gear, hoping passing drivers will offer a dollar or two to support the department. It means raising money with community chicken dinners. It means selling T-shirts at fairs. The money raised helps keep the lights on at the station house. My colleague Mike Baker recently talked to one department in northern Connecticut that has an annual budget of $132,000, which is barely enough to keep its aging vehicles operational and to train its unpaid staff. That department, along with many other volunteer departments across the country, recently confronted a new kind of emergency, Mike writes: The software system it used to track incidents was no longer going to work. Why? Because a private equity firm purchased the platform and planned to shut it down. The software it offered in return would raise the department’s costs from $795 a year to more than $5,000. When Norfolk found a cheaper alternative, the investors bought that brand, too. Mike wrote a smart article about how fire chiefs around the country are now scrambling to manage their software options and rocketing costs as companies flush with venture capital race to take control of the market, not just for software that tracks incidents, but also for schedules, inspections and more. “We don’t have a big tax base,” an assistant fire chief in Norfolk told him. “We have to watch our pennies.” OPINIONS A new American project could unite the nation under one American identity, Vivek Ramaswamy writes. Here is a column by Bret Stephens on Trump’s manners. The Times Sale starts now: 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 Richard Phibbs Favorites from Slick Rick: The pioneering rapper, who is celebrating the 40th anniversary of his song “La-Di-Da-Di,” recorded with Doug E. Fresh, recently told The Times about his 10 favorite things, among them James Brown’s drum tracks, English breakfast tea, his iPhone, barbecue pizza and Clarks Original Wallabee hightops. Wine with dinner? Researchers keep changing their mind about how much alcohol is safe. They now say a small amount may improve your heart health. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was Times readers’ stories of the best gifts they ever received. A passionate intellectual life: Norman Podhoretz, a onetime liberal stalwart who became a neoconservative force as the longtime editor of Commentary magazine, died at 95. TODAY’S NUMBER 13 — That is the number of elephants killed for their ivory since July 2024 along a stretch of highway that runs through a Malaysian rainforest. Five of the animals were beheaded. SPORTS New teams? Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, said the league would decide in 2026 whether to add two new teams. Las Vegas and Seattle are the most likely expansion cities. N.B.A.: Jalen Brunson and the New York Knicks won the third annual N.B.A. Cup with a 124-113 victory over the San Antonio Spurs. RECIPE OF THE DAY Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Yossy Arefi. Prop Stylist: Marina Bevilacqua Here’s a fantastic recipe for a super-savory breakfast casserole you can put together the night before you’d like to serve it: overnight sausage and mushroom strata. Brown the sausage, cook the vegetables in its fat, make a simple egg custard spiked with the flavor of fresh chive, then let that sit overnight in the fridge, covered tightly in foil or plastic wrap. When morning comes, heat your oven to 350, cover with cheese and bake until everything’s melted and golden. You might serve with crunchy greens tossed in a bright vinaigrette. Not me. I like cut fruit with my morning egg bake, drizzled with lime juice. INSIDE ‘AVATAR’ James Cameron JJ Geiger for The New York Times Maureen Dowd profiled the filmmaker James Cameron, and their conversation is as delightful, fast-paced and witty as it always is in Maureen’s profiles — like notes for a Ben Hecht screenplay. Maureen asked: Why did he make the Na’vi, the characters in “Avatar,” blue? Cue Cameron: “Well, because yellow was taken by ‘The Simpsons.’” More on culture Discuss and debate: These are the 25 most notable films of the year, according to our most movie-obsessed critics, reporters and editors. (Fill out your own ballot.) “Track Star” is an online competition show with a straightforward premise: The host, Jack Coyne, queues up a song and contestants win $5 if they can name the artist playing it. If they get the answer right, they can go double or nothing. This was cute and sometimes incredible when Coyne did it with random people on the street. Now his show is a stop on the celebrity promotion trail. See John Fogerty, a fortunate son, take up the challenge. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Run to see Michelle Williams in a “luminous and mesmerizing revival” of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 drama “Anna Christie,” our critic Laura Collins-Hughes writes. “A-game artistry and experiential elegance,” she calls it, adding that it’s “an intoxicating New York blend of grit, cool and stardust.” Moisturize more, and better, with the best creams tested by the thick-skinned dermocrats at Wirecutter. (Did you know the equivalent of more than a tall Starbucks cup of water evaporates from your skin every day?) Get healthier with these tips from the longevity expert Dr. Eric Topol. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was hawthorn. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending some of the morning with The Times and me. London’s great. I saw a fox on the street yesterday during my walk to the office. There are Santas on rollerblades all over the place. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Sam Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 19, 2025 Author Members Posted December 19, 2025 December 18, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. I’m still in London, where Paddington Bear is unavoidable. President Trump defended his economic record in a combative televised address. He also added plaques to his “Presidential Walk of Fame” near the Oval Office. They mock his Democratic predecessors. We have more news below. But I’d like to start today by asking a question you may have had yourself as the United States and Venezuela square off. That is: What is Trump trying to achieve? In Venezuela, in 2021. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times Petrostate Yesterday, Venezuela said its military would escort oil tankers heading to Asia to stop the United States from seizing them. Washington spent the fall punishing and pressuring the Caribbean nation in an ostensible campaign against drugs. Now we may have a glimpse of where this conflict is going. Venezuela, which once welcomed American energy companies, has the world’s largest oil reserves. President Trump wants access to them again. He wrote on social media that U.S. operations there would continue until the country returned to the United States “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” That helps explain the last three months. An escalation The campaign began on Sept. 2, with military strikes on small speedboats that the Trump administration claimed, without offering evidence, were trafficking drugs. Then the strikes continued, again and again. There have been 26 so far, killing 99 people across the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean, acts that legal experts say may amount to war crimes. Then the campaign escalated. Trump authorized planning for covert C.I.A. action and deployed the largest naval force in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The military positioned warships off Venezuela’s coast, sent bombers to fly just offshore and dispatched troops and sensitive radar equipment to Trinidad and Tobago, an island nation just a few miles away. These moves didn’t always make sense. Officials explained each development as an effort to stop the flow of drugs from Venezuela to the United States. They call the country a narcostate and its president, Nicolás Maduro, a cartel leader. But Venezuela is not a drug producer, and most narcotics smuggled through the country are headed for Europe, not the United States. U.S. officials say it’s about dislodging Maduro from power. Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair. Why? Developments in the last week offered another rationale. Liquid gold In the last week, the United States has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker and promised to blockade “ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS” going to and from the country. Officially, these boats are trading crude in violation of U.S. sanctions on Iran, as they’ve done for many years, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. But there’s more, as my colleagues Edward Wong and Julian Barnes put it: Venezuela and its oil lie at the nexus of two of Mr. Trump’s stated national security priorities: dominance of energy resources and control of the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela has about 17 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, or more than 300 billion barrels, nearly four times the amount in the United States. And no nation has a bigger foothold in Venezuela’s oil industry than China, the superpower whose immense trade presence in the Western Hemisphere the Trump administration aims to curb. Trump wants that oil for the United States. He has wanted it for years. During his first term, he backed attempts to oust Maduro. After he left office, he lamented their failure. “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse,” he said in a 2023 speech. “We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil.” This time, Edward and Julian report, he’s pushing harder. In secret negotiations with the Trump administration, Maduro offered to open Venezuela’s oil industry to American companies. But that would have left Maduro in charge of dispensing it. The White House said no deal. Prospecting Acquiring oil is not the administration’s only argument for a sudden and fierce Venezuela policy. The U.S. strikes have also targeted boats off Colombia, suggesting the attacks are not entirely about Maduro. Additionally, much of Venezuela’s oil trade violates U.S. sanctions — and props up governments like Cuba’s. But Trump remembers a past when South and Central America were open markets. Before Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976, foreign companies accounted for 70 percent of production there. American drillers like Exxon, Mobil and Gulf Oil were major players. (Today, only one American company, Chevron, still operates in Venezuela.) In the early 1960s, my colleague Simon Romero explains, Venezuela had the largest American expatriate community in the world. Yesterday, Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, recalled that bygone era on social media. His post, a political gambit filled with misrepresentations, read like the beginning of a mission statement. It was an explanation of all that had come before, from the boat strikes to the military buildup to the threat of a blockade. It read like a prologue. “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” he wrote. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.” For more The House rejected two resolutions that would have forced Trump to go to Congress for approval before attacking Venezuela. The U.S. military has a long history in Latin America. Read about it here. DENATURALIZATION A naturalization ceremony. Tony Luong for The New York Times The government is ramping up efforts to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance from the Trump administration. Under federal law, naturalized Americans — people who have acquired U.S. citizenship, numbering around 26 million — can lose that status if they committed fraud while applying for citizenship, or in a few other narrow circumstances. Around 120 total denaturalization cases have been filed since 2017. Now, though, the administration’s new guidelines call for 100 to 200 new cases per month. Activists warn that such an effort could lead immigration officials to go after people who made honest mistakes on their citizenship paperwork, and that the program would sow fear among law-abiding Americans. THE LATEST NEWS Trump’s Speech President Trump Doug Mills/The New York Times In a televised address from the White House, Trump argued that the economy was doing better than many Americans felt it was — and that the bad parts were the Biden administration’s fault. Read takeaways. The president cited misleading statistics to insist, wrongly, that prices were coming down. We have a fact check. China The Trump administration asked Congress to approve more than $11 billion in arms sales to Taiwan. It’s a signal of Trump’s commitment to supporting Taiwan, which fears an invasion from China. A video of the secret 1989 court-martial of a Chinese general who refused to crush protesters in Tiananmen Square appeared on YouTube. Reiner Killings Nick Reiner, who faces murder charges in the deaths of his parents, Rob and Michele Singer Reiner, appeared before a judge for the first time. Reiner spent much of his life battling drug addiction, an affliction that millions of Americans have. For their families, this news has felt close. Bondi Attacks Australia’s prime minister announced measures to combat hate speech and antisemitism. “She should be alive”: At a funeral, mourners remembered the youngest victim of the Bondi Beach attacks, who was 10. Her name was Matilda. Some British police forces said they would arrest protesters who used the phrase “globalize the intifada.” They said a “more assertive” approach was needed after the terrorist attack in Australia and a previous assault on a synagogue in Manchester, England. Congress The House will vote on extending Obamacare subsidies in January. Four Republicans joined Democrats in forcing the measure. The Senate passed a $900 billion defense policy bill that advances much of Trump’s national security agenda, with some measures to reassert congressional oversight. More on Politics In an audio recording from 2020, which The Times obtained, Trump pressed a Georgia lawmaker to help overturn his election loss. Listen to it here. Dan Bongino, the No. 2 official at the F.B.I., will step down next month. He had a brief but tumultuous stint at the bureau, where he was known for his volcanic temper. The Health Department canceled grants to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The group has repeatedly criticized Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine policies. The Trump administration will dismantle a major center for weather and climate research, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, to lead NASA. Trump first nominated Isaacman last year, then pulled his nomination, and then nominated him again. Other Big Stories Pope Leo has named an Illinois bishop to replace Cardinal Timothy Dolan in New York. Police in Providence, R.I. are trying to find a person who may have crossed paths with the Brown University gunman shortly before the attack. OPINIONS If Democrats want to make good on their affordability message, they should support oil and gas production, Matthew Yglesias writes. Here is a column by Nicholas Kristof on addressing addiction. The Times Sale starts now: 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 Clockwise from top left, Diane Keaton, Kanzi, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Angie Stone, Roberta Flack and Jill Sobule. Photographs by Norman Seeff, Gregg Segal, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Yves Beauvais, Anthony Barboza/Getty Images, Marc Baptiste The Lives They Lived: Many artists, innovators and thinkers died this year. The New York Times Magazine has tributes to them, which aren’t obituaries so much as explorations of brilliance lost. Click here to read them. A new Gilded Age: Conspicuous consumption has returned to restaurants in New York City, Julia Moskin reports. Here, for example, is a $435 tomahawk steak at Le Chêne in the West Village, along with a $260 turbot fillet. At La Grande Boucherie in Midtown, there’s a whole suckling pig, $600. The lobster roll at Lex Yard in the Waldorf Astoria? It’ll run you just under $70. “The more expensive it is, the faster it sells,” the chef at Le Chêne said. Stealing the show: The Oscars are leaving network television. They will be streamed live on YouTube starting in 2029. TODAY’S NUMBER 2,400 — That is the approximate number of dinosaur footprints a nature photographer discovered recently in the Italian Alps. They are more than 200 million years old and so well preserved that the marks of toes and claws are visible in the stone. SPORTS College football: Sherrone Moore, the former Michigan coach, had a “long history of domestic violence” against a female staff member, the woman’s lawyer told the police. Moore told the police he did not physically assault her. N.F.L.: Referees told the Detroit Lions to stop pretending to flick their boogers in a celebration, said Amon-Ra St. Brown, a wide receiver. RECIPE OF THE DAY David Malosh for The New York Times Here’s a light and lovely recipe for chicken ragù bianco, a simple preparation of shredded chicken mixed with a sofritto, herbs and water that pairs beautifully with what you might call a grabby pasta, one with texture that can hold the brothlike sauce. It does well in the freezer, too, so we’ve written the recipe for twice the amount you’ll need for a pound of pasta. (Save the rest for another dinner.) Before adding the water to braise the chicken, I might add a splash or two of dry white wine to deglaze the pan. PADDINGTON’S STATION Paddington Bear Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York Times The biggest star in London right now? My colleague Alex Marshall says it’s a four-foot-tall bear, the title character of “Paddington: The Musical.” I took a walk around the city’s West End recently, and it was hard to disagree. There were happy crowds bunched up tight in front of the Savoy Theater to see him, many children wearing marmalade merch and red bucket hats. I looked into getting tickets for later in the week. Oh, how they laughed. More on culture Also in London: Minnie Driver, who spoke to our reporter Alexis Soloski in advance of her debut in the new season of “Emily in Paris,” which starts tonight on Netflix. Driver plays a penniless princess who supports herself through cheeky sponsored content and livestreams. “They’ll buy anything I tell them to,” her character says. Late night hosts mocked Trump’s prime-time speech. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS The New York Times Avoid these breakup lines. They’re real — and really bad. “It’s not me — it’s 100 percent about you” is a standout. Procrastinate no longer. Here are 41 terrific last-minute holiday gifts from the Santa-confident experts at Wirecutter. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was plaudit. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 21, 2025 Author Members Posted December 21, 2025 December 19, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The search for the Brown University shooter is over. Last night, the police discovered the body of a man, 48, they believe opened fire on an exam study session at Brown University. They said they found him inside a storage unit in New Hampshire with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The breakthrough ended a wrenching five-day search. It also appeared to resolve another university shooting: Officials believe the same man was responsible for the killing earlier this week of an M.I.T. professor. There’s more on that below. Then we answer your questions about the news. A gray Nissan Outside a storage facility in New Hampshire. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times The breakthrough came from an anonymous tip. It directed officials to a post on Reddit: “I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a gray Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,” the Reddit user posted, according to an affidavit. The day after the post was made, the writer approached the authorities. He told them he had encountered a suspicious man in the Brown building where the shooting occurred. The man, whom the police referred to as John, said that he saw the suspect in a bathroom of the campus building around two hours before the first shots were reported. John said they made eye contact, and that the suspect’s clothing was wrong for the weather. John said he then followed the man after he left the building to a Nissan vehicle with a Florida plate. Instead of entering the vehicle, the suspect walked around the block, with John behind him. John said it was like “a game of cat and mouse.” At one point, the two men spoke. “Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?” John asked the suspect, according to the affidavit. The suspect responded, “Why are you harassing me?” John left soon after. The information “blew this case right open,” the Rhode Island attorney general said. They tracked the plate to a rental agreement. And with that, they had a name: Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national and a former graduate student at Brown. Then came another breakthrough. The officials linked the car to the killing earlier this week of a professor at M.I.T., Nuno Loureiro, who was 47. He and the suspect had once attended the same academic program in Portugal. The authorities tracked the car to a storage unit the suspect had rented in New Hampshire. When they swarmed it, they found his body, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Read what we know about the suspect — and follow the latest updates here. President Trump Kenny Holston/The New York Times Trump’s America: F.A.Q. President Trump has been clear about at least one thing from the start of his term in January: He wants to remake the federal government and leave his imprint on the country. The Times asked readers to send us questions about what Trump’s policies might mean for the American public — for them. We heard from more than 1,000 people. They had questions about how tax cuts, immigration, prices and many other issues could affect their lives. For answers, we reached out to Times reporters. What follows is a sampling of those questions, and our responses. Who benefited from the recent tax cuts? Are taxes changing for all Americans? Answered by Andrew Duehren Covers tax policy Most people will pay at least somewhat lower taxes because of the cuts Republicans passed in July. The law extends tax cuts first put in place in 2017, so this year’s tax cut won’t feel like much of a change for many people. Republicans did add some new breaks that could help Americans who work overtime, earn tips or live in high-tax states, or who are 65 or over. Overall, though, higher-income Americans will still benefit the most. My grandson is looking for his first job. Is there a future in manufacturing in the United States? Answered by Farah Stockman Covers manufacturing Yes, there is, especially for young people with skills in automation and robotics, seen as crucial to making the sector globally competitive. As factories become more high-tech, new jobs are opening up in robot repair and mechatronics (a field combining mechanical engineering with electronics). Mechatronics technicians earned a median salary of $70,760 last year with a two-year associate degree. Those with more education and experience can earn well over $100,000. My child is starting first grade next year. I’m curious to know what has changed in the way teachers are teaching American history in K-12. Answered by Dana Goldstein Covers education The answer very much depends on where you live. In recent years, more than 20 states, mostly Republican-leaning, passed laws restricting what can be said in the classroom about race, gender, sexuality and American history. In Florida, under Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, civics classes now emphasize the Christian beliefs of the founding fathers. In Texas, teachers are supposed to avoid history lessons that might prompt students to feel “guilt” or “anguish” on account of their race or sex. I was deployed overseas and worked with people eager to move to the United States. Are refugees still being let into the country? Answered by Madeleine Ngo Covers immigration and economic policy Refugees are still being admitted to the country, but the Trump administration has slashed the number that are accepted, and has prioritized slots for mostly white Afrikaner South Africans. In October, the Trump administration lowered the ceiling of refugee admissions to 7,500 for this fiscal year. That’s down from the 125,000 cap the Biden administration set last year. Why is my electric bill higher now than it was a year ago? Answered by Brad Plumer Covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming It depends on where you live. Electricity prices have been rising faster than inflation in roughly half of all states in the last few years. In California and Maine, wildfires and storms have imposed steep costs on utilities. The Northeast has struggled with high natural gas prices. In the Mid-Atlantic, soaring demand from data centers combined with a wave of power plant retirements is raising prices. Many utilities are also spending more to upgrade their aging grids. I’d like to know more about all the different ways President Trump’s orders will affect the transgender community. Will my trans daughter still be able to get health care and to travel freely? Answered by Amy Harmon Covers how shifting conceptions of gender affect everyday life in the United States The Trump administration has adopted policies that limit the participation of transgender people in many areas of public life. If your trans daughter wants to serve in the military, she can’t. If she has a passport with an “F” marker, she will receive one with an “M” when it is time to renew. It may be more difficult for trans minors to access gender medicine because several high-profile clinics have closed, leading to longer waiting lists at those that remain open. For more: The federal government proposed new rules to end gender-related care for minors, threatening to pull federal funding from any hospital that offers such treatment. The House approved legislation to criminalize gender transition treatments for minors and bar Medicaid payments for those treatments. The bills have little chance of passing in the Senate. Read more reader questions and reporter answers here. THE LATEST NEWS President Trump Cannabis plants. Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times Trump signed an executive order to downgrade cannabis from the most restrictive category of drugs, easing some limitations and allowing for more research. (The move does not legalize marijuana.) The Kennedy Center board, composed largely of Trump’s allies, voted to change the center’s name to the Trump-Kennedy Center. Congress would have to act to make it official. “Don’s best friend”: Trump has minimized his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, but documents and interviews reveal an intense relationship. Trump’s social media company, which oversees Truth Social, is merging with a nuclear fusion company. Immigration A Wisconsin judge was found guilty of obstructing ICE agents as they tried to arrest an undocumented immigrant. She was accused of ushering a man to a side door as federal agents waited outside a courtroom. She faces up to five years in prison. The Trump administration is suspending the immigrant visa program under which the man suspected of killing two Brown University students and an M.I.T. professor moved to the U.S., Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said. War in Ukraine European leaders agreed to keep Ukraine funded for two years with a loan of about $105 billion. They failed to agree on using frozen Russian assets to back the loan. Bondi Beach Shooting On Bondi Beach. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times The Australian government will launch a gun buyback program to take hundreds of thousands of firearms off the streets, the prime minister said. The government has said that it will tighten laws around gun ownership. More International News Collecting soil samples at a lead-recycling plant in Ogijo, Nigeria. Victor Adewale for The New York Times After a Times investigation linked battery recycling plants in Nigeria to lead poisoning, Nigerian officials have shuttered the factories and are planning to conduct hundreds of blood tests. A French anesthesiologist was sentenced to life in jail for intentionally poisoning 30 patients, 12 of whom died. 52 FACES OF THE YEAR The New York Times Do you recognize the smiling actress in the bowler hat? What about the gentleman standing in front of the Canadian flag? Or that (kind of creepy) doll with the sharp teeth? Each year, around this time, the Morning newsletter team puts together a game that shows you 52 faces of people who were notable this year, across the broad world of Times coverage, and asks if you can name them. Some are politicians. Others are athletes. One, as we said, is a creepy doll. Play this year’s edition here. Good luck! And remember to use the hints if you’re unsure. OPINIONS College campuses should have tech-free spaces for students to better focus on their studies, Colleen Kinder writes. If Republicans want to be the party of the working and middle class, they should close tax loopholes for rich people like me, Mitt Romney writes. The Times Sale starts now: 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 In Tokyo. Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press A panda problem: There have been giant pandas in Ueno Zoo in Tokyo for more than half a century. Now, Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei, twin 4-year-old pandas on loan from China, are scheduled to go home. A line to say goodbye stretched for more than a mile. Origin story: Bhavitha Mandava, an N.Y.U. student, was scouted on the subway. She’s now one of the world’s top models. Alisha Haridasani Gupta tells the tale. Say cheese: Eating high-fat dairy may be tied to a lower risk of developing dementia, a new study finds. Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about new plaques under Trump’s presidential “walk of fame.” They denigrate some of his predecessors. TODAY’S NUMBER 19 — That is the number of people Florida has executed this year, a state record, up significantly from its previous record of eight executions, set in 1984 and matched in 2014. The 19th took place last night. SPORTS Motorsports: Greg Biffle, one of NASCAR’s greatest drivers, and his wife and two children were among seven people killed in a plane crash at an airport near Charlotte, N.C. He was 55. N.F.L.: The Seattle Seahawks scored a two-point conversion in overtime for a 38-37 comeback win over the Los Angeles Rams. RECIPE OF THE DAY Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Yossy Arefi. Prop Stylist: Marina Bevilacqua Project time! Here’s a big undertaking with an incredible payoff: a giant Mont Blanc, a classic French dessert: layers of cream and meringue stacked to the rafters, drizzled with strands of chestnut purée, above a secret layer of puddinglike mocha crémeux. It’s meant to resemble Europe’s largest mountain — or perhaps the cap of the exceptionally expensive fountain pen of the same name. Fair warning: If it takes somewhat less time to ascend this recipe than an Alp, it still takes the better part of a day. (Totally worth it.) Watch the magic come together, then get into the kitchen to bake. #COLDPLAYGATE Kristin Cabot Greta Rybus for The New York Times Kristin Cabot is the woman from the Coldplay concert: the one who appeared on the Jumbotron in the arms of her boss and soon found herself at the center of an international furor. Cabot, who had recently split with her husband, was pilloried online — called a slut and a home-wrecker, her body parts put under scrutiny. In her first interview since the concert, Cabot spent the day talking with Lisa Miller about what it feels like to be a punchline and a target. Lisa’s takeaway from that conversation? Marriages are complicated, so are separations, and who can identify the precise moment a romance begins or ends? If people at work are into each other, at what point should they disclose their relationship up the chain? Even if two consenting people are engaging in something illicit or secret or hurtful (which people do all the time), should they be dragged across the global stage as if they deserved to be savaged and tormented? I hope you’ll read the story. More on culture “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” the third installment of James Cameron’s science fiction franchise — more conflict between colonists and the indigenous Na’vi — opens today. Manohla Dargis has a review. My colleague Lindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic, released a playlist of her favorite music of 2025, and I’m excited: five hours, 90 tracks. Let’s go. Late night hosts discussed Trump’s address to the country about the economy. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Pour yourself a perfect gift for a coffee lover, with the help of the burr-grinding French pressers at Wirecutter. Listen to the San Antonio Spurs play the Atlanta Hawks at 6:30 p.m. Central time, on WOAI radio. That is an old-school and deeply enjoyable way to spend an evening. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were bluefin and unbelief. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 26, 2025 Author Members Posted December 26, 2025 December 20, 2025 Good morning. Today, your highly personal, delightfully specific bests of 2025. María Jesús Contreras Closing arguments By Melissa Kirsch Last weekend I went to see the string quartet Ethel perform a reimagining of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” including some new “seasons” by modern composers. Hearing familiar music with new additions — a keyboard player and a drummer joined in, there were EDM beats at one point — was exciting. It felt like a jazz performance, riffs on familiar motifs, exciting digressions. That’s sort of what the holiday season is: an established and well-loved format that we improvise on each year. Going out for dinner instead of the usual roast at home? Handmade presents only? How are we noodling on the holidays this time? Today is my second-favorite Morning of the year, wherein I get to relay to you all your favorite things from the past 12 months. (My favorite Morning is next week, when I bring you the best advice readers received this year.) Thank you to everyone who sent in their idiosyncratic, genre-nonspecific bests of 2025. Hopefully you’ll find the recommendations below as creative and delightful as I did. (Last year’s is here.) Some of my own highlights: The best new-to-me cocktail that gave me a use for the bottle of Chartreuse I’ve had sitting unopened for years was the Last Word. The film that I can’t stop thinking about is Julia Loktev’s “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow.” The best change I made to my routine was adding mouthwash between flossing and brushing. The show that reliably got me out of a bad mood was the weird Tim Robinson comedy “The Chair Company.” The best thing I started doing that scared me at first was cutting back my leggy, overgrown plants. The film characters I most wanted to be friends with were the leads played by Eva Victor and Naomi Ackie in “Sorry, Baby.” The best art experience I had was Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” at MoMA. The best stuff you did The best use of the library is to check out board games, says Liz Schutz from Phoenix. She could never justify buying pricier games like Catan without trying them first. Stephanie Emiliani of North Tonawanda, N.Y., recommends making cookies at 8 p.m. “just because you can.” There are so many things we should be doing for that very reason! The best date that Kathryn Sorrells of Denver had with her husband was staying up until 2 a.m. making a playlist of the top 100 songs of their lifetime. “It felt like an urgent and important project,” she said, comparing it to how everything felt when she was in her 20s (she’s in her 50s now). I want that playlist! The best vacation Mia Morgante from Milwaukee took this year involved her book club “pretending to be sickly Victorian ladies taking a season rest cure in Cape Cod.” The best habit Chelsey Ryskalczyk from Seattle accidentally invented was sitting in her car for five minutes before going inside. She calls it “meditation with seat warmers.” And the best decision Michael Hirschhorn of New York City made this year was “calling her and telling her I wanted to be with her.” Your best in culture Best chord progression: “Loud” by Olivia Dean. — Kaylee Ellis, Boston Best unsolicited musical performance: The pair (one saxophonist, one trumpeter) who play jazz inside the 86th Street Q stop on select evenings. — Sarah Freeman, New York City Best sentence that provided perspective: “To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it,” from “All Things Are Too Small” by Becca Rothfeld. — Nicole Sparacino, Madison, Wis. The best piece of classical music written by a heavy metal guitarist: “Dystopia Symphony,” piano version by Miyako Watanabe. — Charles Hsu, San Francisco Best way to wind down: Put on a Chet Baker record and sip on a spritz. — Madeleine Breza, Denver Your best changes to routines Victoria Xavier, of Caxias do Sul, Brazil, now waits until the next day to reply to messages received after 10 p.m. “It’s a game changer,” she says. Doing chair yoga via Zoom with her two sisters every weekend is Tica Martin of St. Augustine, Fla.’s best new ritual. She admitted they spend most of the time “exercising their mouths.” Agathe Galtung of Oslo started making large batches of homemade granola. “I had never thought of myself as that kind of person,” she said. But it’s given her “a surprising amount of joy and stability.” The most effective way Leslie Mignault of Providence, R.I., has found to keep her mood up in winter is to go for regular bike rides. She prescribes “two pair pants, two pair socks, three tops, good gloves, a windbreaker, and a helmet liner, as much of it in merino wool as you can manage.” Even more bests Best way to build community: Become a regular somewhere. anywhere! Bar, coffee shop, library — for me, it’s my local running store. — Eve Vanagas, Minneapolis Best new tradition: Use Black Friday through Cyber Monday as “Unsubscribe Weekend,” since every company that has your info will email or text you. — Sam Friedlander, Los Angeles Best moment of acceptance: Realizing that trying to get away with things by being cute works better for my cats than it does for me. — Ellen Peters, Sun Prairie, Wis. Best cookie advice: Toast the sugar, swap extract for vanilla powder or paste, brown the butter, and use good chocolate that you chop yourself. The results justify the effort. — Noah Werthaiser, Ashland, Ore. Best self-care: Getting TSA PreCheck! — Margaret Roberts, Kodiak, Alaska Best overheard sentence: “The thing is, it took us four days to realize the dog spoke only Italian.” — Lucia Kanter St. Amour, San Francisco Best parlor game invented accidentally: “UnGoogleable.” Each person tries to describe something without using its actual function. (“It’s the tiny wet cave where thoughts echo.” → “A sink??”) — Julie Essenberg, Montague, Mich. Best moment of wonder: Seeing the northern lights in our own backyard in suburban Philadelphia (after trekking all the way to northern Sweden to see them in 2020). — Marianne Miserandino, Abington, Pa. Best scene I’ve encountered on my 11 p.m. walk home from work: A deer circling and scratching the ground like a dog before lying down to sleep. — Jorja Hegner, Pittsburgh Best name for a moth: Police Car Moth (Gnophaela vermiculata). — Jane Dykas, McCall, Idaho Best way to get out of a conversation: “I’ll leave you to it!” — Megan Rounsaville, Bethesda, Md. Best way to say sorry: Giving “clean” apologies. State exactly what you’re sorry for, no more, no less, and what you’ll do differently in the future. — Emily Wasserman, Portland, Maine Best way to keep mischievous kids in line: Change a friend or family member’s name and profile picture to Santa Claus in your phone. When your little darlings are acting up, simply call “Santa” (or better yet, text and ask him to call you). Hold the phone up for the kids to see who’s on the line, and watch their eyes widen and their behavior immediately improve. — Laura LaGrone, Asheville, N.C. THE LATEST NEWS Epstein Files Jeffrey Epstein in a photograph included in Friday’s release. Department of Justice The Justice Department published thousands of government files and hundreds of photographs related to Jeffrey Epstein, but failed to meet the deadline to release all of its files. Lawmakers in both parties criticized the partial, heavily redacted release. Times reporters spent the day combing through the documents. Here is a look at what they found. Yesterday’s release seemed to focus heavily on Bill Clinton, including photos of him in a hot tub and swimming in a pool with Ghislaine Maxwell. President Trump is rarely mentioned in the new set of documents. Military The U.S. attacked Islamic State sites across Syria in retaliation for the killings of two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter last Saturday. Fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery fired on more than 70 targets. The U.S. military also killed another five people on boats the Trump administration claimed were trafficking drugs. The boat-strike campaign has now killed at least 104 people since September. Politics A crew installing President Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center yesterday. Eric Lee for The New York Times The Kennedy Center affixed Trump’s name to the facade of the arts center, a building that was constructed as a living memorial to the slain 35th president. Trump announced deals with nine pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices, the latest move in his campaign to bring costs in line with those of European countries. Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who transformed herself from a moderate to a MAGA loyalist, abruptly ended her campaign for governor and said she would leave the House after her term ends next year. Other Big Stories Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to make a major change to the U.S. childhood inoculation schedule next year and adopt that of Denmark, which recommends fewer vaccines. An autopsy determined that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the man suspected of killing two Brown University students and an M.I.T. professor, died two days before the police found his body in a storage unit. Lou Cannon, a journalist who wrote several biographies on Ronald Reagan, died at 92. Weeks after a father and his 6-year-old son were separated by immigration officials in New York City, in a case that drew outrage, the two have been deported to China. The typical middle-class family today is much richer than its counterpart in the 1960s, according to economists. But Americans in their 20s and 30s say the numbers don’t capture how unaffordable modern life feels. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV Thea Traff for The New York Times Minnie Driver, an unlikely movie star of the ’90s, has weathered ups and downs to find herself, at 55, as busy as ever. Next up: a role in “Emily in Paris.” Boxing was once synonymous with cable networks and pay-per-view. Not anymore: Big matches have moved to streaming platforms. (Last night, in a fight on Netflix, Jake Paul was knocked out by the former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua.) Music The Metropolitan Opera wants to court a younger generation with an abridged production of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute.” It even manages to slip in a “6-7.” Jelly Roll, the rapper turned country music star, was pardoned by the governor of Tennessee for his previous robbery and drug convictions. More Culture A 27-foot Buddha, inspired by the Bamiyan Buddhas, will gaze down on New York’s High Line next year. Charisse Pearlina Weston finds new use for materials developed to monitor people in security checkpoints or interrogation rooms in an ambitious exhibition in Manhattan. A new Broadway production, “Bug,” follows a working-class Oklahoma woman into a murky labyrinth of conspiracy theories. Critic Ben Brantley calls it “one of the most alarmingly topical plays” of the season. The Times Sale starts now: 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. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Brett Regot. By Melissa Clark Pastina soup Amid all the celebratory feasting that goes on this time of year, it’s usually the simplest dishes I crave most: bowls of pastas and soups — or, even better, the two of them together in Lidey Heuck’s pastina soup. Adding a Parmesan rind to the pot results in a full-flavored broth in which to cook tiny pastina pasta, which gets soft and porridge-like next to the bits of carrot, onion and celery. It’s a gentle, fortifying and comforting thing that both satisfies and soothes. REAL ESTATE Adam and Amanda Powell with their daughters, Charlotte and Olivia. Shelby Tauber for The New York Times The Hunt: After several years in Europe, a young family set out to find a home near Dallas with a big kitchen and plenty of room for guests. Which one did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $1.85 million: An A-frame in Whitefish, Mont., an Arts and Crafts-style close to Lake Michigan, and a home from 1910 near the Kennebunk River in Maine. Demanding guests: Kindred, a home-swapping app, accepts only half of those who apply to join the platform. LIVING Morgan McSweeney Jesse Barber for The New York Times TikTok’s Bill Nye: Can science win on social media? Ask Dr. Noc. Fashion chatter: “Emily in Paris” moved to Rome, but a prestigious award and a new book show how the series left a stylish mark on Paris. Courtroom attire: Luigi Mangione, the man accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare’s C.E.O., has begun wearing suits to his pretrial hearings. Our fashion critic explains the strategy behind the look. MAGA intellectuals: “Furious Minds,” by Laura K. Field, traces the ascendancy of hard-right thinkers shaping American politics. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER The best last-minute gifts If you’ve procrastinated on holiday shopping, you are not alone. And you are definitely not doomed. Wirecutter’s gift experts have gathered a wide array of pleasing and practical last-minute gifts that can either be sent to loved ones’ inboxes (how about a MasterClass credit or a subscription for superb cinema on demand?) or delivered straight to their doorsteps in two days or less. And if you’re really panicking, enter the supermarket — as in, you should literally visit your local supermarket. We have found that the aisles tend to be stocked with some surprisingly gift-worthy, Wirecutter-approved delights. GAME OF THE WEEK Emily Hellmuth of Texas A&M, left, and Lizzie Carr of Kentucky. Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images, Jordan Prather-Imagn Images Texas A&M vs. Kentucky, women’s volleyball final: Texas A&M has been rolling through the March Madness-style tournament that decides the N.C.A.A. volleyball champion. The Aggies reached the Final Four by upsetting Nebraska, a No. 1 seed and a volleyball powerhouse, which had not lost a single match all season. Then, on Thursday, they took down another No. 1 seed, Pitt. One team stands in the way of A&M’s first national title: Kentucky, yet another No. 1 seed, which enters this championship on a 27-match winning streak. Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern on ABC NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was palliative. 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. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 26, 2025 Author Members Posted December 26, 2025 December 21, 2025 Good morning. The U.S. Coast Guard boarded an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, power has been restored to most of San Francisco after a widespread outage yesterday and Bowen Yang left “S.N.L.” We’ll have more news below, but first we want to examine how rising beef prices have stressed restaurant owners this holiday season. Today, Julie Creswell, a business reporter, explains the dilemma. At Halls Chophouse. Hunter McRae for The New York Times High steaks By Julie Creswell I cover the food industry, and my go-to steakhouse side is creamed spinach. Americans eat a lot of beef — nearly 59 pounds per person this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That equals to about 118 eight-ounce filet mignons for everyone in the United States. And they eat a lot of it in December. The holiday season is a hot time for steakhouses, as companies book back rooms for lavish parties and families treat themselves to nice bottles of wine. This year, though, it’s been tricky. Beef prices are near record levels. And steakhouses — from the wood-paneled clubs of Manhattan to chain outposts along highways — are trying to cover their costs and still keep their customers. In early November, Tommy Hall, who oversees five fine-dining steakhouses in the Southeast, told me that beef prices had climbed to a level that put his Halls Chophouse restaurants in a “code red.” So he raised the price of an eight-ounce filet mignon to $61 from $57. A rib-eye was bumped to $85 from $82. The back story The problem is a classic imbalance between supply and demand. While Americans still crave and eat a lot of beef, the nation’s cattle inventory is at its lowest level since the 1950s. Herds began to shrink in recent years partly as a result of widespread drought, which reduced grazing land and forced ranchers to buy more feed. Closures of meatpacking plants have also depressed cattle prices, since there are fewer processors purchasing cattle. The prices of beef products, from ground beef to roasts to prime cuts of steak, have been on the rise since the Covid pandemic. But they’ve really shot higher in the last couple of years. In September 2023, a pound of ground beef averaged $5.11 across the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, it is nearly 24 percent higher — more than $6.30 per pound. A U.S.D.A. Choice boneless sirloin has risen 22 percent in that same time. Preparing steak. Hunter McRae for The New York Times The effect on your bill The result of all of this is that diners will be paying more for their steak when they eat out. But how much more depends on the type of restaurant. Many fine-dining steakhouses, which typically sell the highest grade of prime steak to higher-income diners, say they are seeing little pushback as they price an eight-ounce filet mignon above $60. That’s a trend at high-end restaurants of all types, my colleague Julia Moskin reports: Chefs say affluent patrons are flocking to the fanciest, and priciest, items on their menus. But midpriced restaurants, which typically sell choice grades of steak and cater to a less-wealthy clientele, face a bigger challenge: How to raise prices to cover increased beef expenses while not chasing away customers? Outback Steakhouse began raising prices a couple of years ago, and some analysts say it may have pushed too hard. Traffic has nose-dived. And the stock of its parent company, Bloomin’ Brands, has plummeted more than 40 percent in the past year. But Texas Roadhouse has tried to keep price increases small and, as a result, customers continue to flood in. On a Friday night in mid-November, I visited a Texas Roadhouse in North Plainfield, N.J. The parking lot was jammed, and about 30 people stood in the lobby waiting for tables. As I nibbled on soft, pillowy rolls, slathered with the restaurant’s special honey-cinnamon butter, and dug into an eight-ounce Dallas filet ($28.99 with two sides), staff members rolled out a saddle into the middle of the restaurant. A woman gamely got on as the staff broke into a raucous birthday chant, with patrons clapping along. With a final “Yeehaw!” we all returned to our steaks. THE LATEST NEWS Venezuela In the waters off Venezuela, in a photo supplied by the U.S. government. Department of Homeland Security The U.S. Coast Guard stopped and boarded an oil tanker off Venezuela. The tanker was not under U.S. sanctions. It was the second action this month against a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil. The Epstein Files More than dozen photos from the Epstein files, including one of President Trump, have been removed from a government website without explanation. Grand jury records from the cases against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were released, but they offer little new information. The Epstein files included photos of Bill Clinton and have resurfaced his past scandals and controversies. Politics At Turning Point USA’s convention. Jordan Gale for The New York Times At Turning Point USA’s annual convention, speakers attacked one another rather than Democrats, indicating unresolved issues in the MAGA movement. In his first year back in the White House, Trump has expanded executive power and centralized his own authority. Many of the elections held in 2025 were seen as early tests of how Republicans might fare in next year’s midterms. Here are five takeaways from the off-off-year cycle. Immigration is causing rifts within the Baptist church as more members support harsh crackdowns. Bondi Beach Attacks Jews in Australia had long feared an attack on their community, which includes many people descended from Holocaust survivors. The neighborhood in southern India where one of the gunmen grew up before emigrating to Australia fears being blamed for the Bondi Beach attacks. More International News In South Africa, at least nine people were killed and 10 injured in a shooting at a tavern near Johannesburg. The Chinese authorities have arrested dozens of members of one of China’s largest unofficial Protestant congregations. Canada is struggling with violence caused by an influx of illegal guns from the U.S. The Times embedded with frontline Ukrainian drone operators to understand their work, and how cheap drones have changed combat as we know it. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Trump ordered that marijuana be removed from a category of dangerous drugs. Should he have? Yes. The question of whether marijuana should be legal requires substantive research on the drug, which Trump’s decision allows. “We cannot manage what we don’t measure,” Aaron Carroll writes for Times Opinion. No. Trump’s decision flies in the face of the Make America Healthy Again movement, as many Americans will interpret it as permission to light up. “The MAHA movement is right that ultraprocessed foods are a problem, but pot may be worse than fried Oreos,” The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes. FROM OPINION Jessica Craig-Martin/Trunk Archive Elizabeth Austin is always the one to host for the holidays. Breaking that mold means either asking for help or stopping entirely, she writes. Nicholas Kristof discusses Jesus’ message with a scholar. The Times Sale starts now: 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 Human personas: A.I. chatbots have been designed to behave like people. Some experts think that’s a terrible idea. Blue Christmas: Do you find holiday songs sort of depressing? Melissa Kirsch argues that most of the season’s songs are a little sad — and that’s part of why we love them. Anti-cartel offensive: Omar García Harfuch wants to defeat Mexico’s powerful criminal groups. Many before him have failed. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about the takeaways from the Epstein files. A creative force: The costume designer Theodor Pistek worked on more than 100 films, including “Amadeus,” for which he won an Oscar. He was also a noted driver, and painter, of racecars. He died at 93. THE PURSUIT OF UTOPIA Amanda Seyfried Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a movie starring Amanda Seyfried, comes out Christmas Day. Seyfried plays the founder of the Shakers, a religious movement and one of the longest-running utopian experiments in American history. It’s a film about longing for another, better world. The director, Mona Fastvold, frames that pursuit as a road that runs through hell. The film explores how readily sanity can slip into insanity, order into chaos and idyll into war. It does so with a cast wearing bonnets and singing their spiritual longing into existence, beating their chests in unison. (Yes, it’s a musical.) The Times ranked the film among its best movies of 2025. In the “Believing” newsletter, Lauren Jackson speaks to Seyfried and Fastvold about their own spirituality — and why they decided to make a this movie now. Read more here. Sign up for the Believing newsletter. A weekly newsletter about how people live religion and spirituality now, with Lauren Jackson. Get it in your inbox SPORTS N.F.L.: The Chicago Bears defeated the Green Bay Packers in overtime, while the Philadelphia Eagles won the N.F.C. East with a victory over the Washington Commanders. College basketball: Texas Tech pulled off a huge comeback at Madison Square Garden, breaking Duke’s undefeated streak. THE INTERVIEW Raja Shehadeh Philip Montgomery for The New York Times By David Marchese This week’s subject for The Interview is the Palestinian writer, lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, who has been documenting what it means to live under Israeli occupation for decades. At the end of another brutal year of strife and suffering, I thought it might be useful to speak with a writer who has a firsthand sense of the ways in which the past need not portend the future — and the ways in which it should. Given that politics based in raw power are so ascendant now, what is the role of a justice-driven writer? The first thing is to document, make the situation clear and avoid mystification. Colonization works by mystifying, by making people lose a sense of who they are and how they got to the point that they got to. The people who are younger than me never knew the land as it was before, never knew what the hills looked like before the settlements were built all over them, never knew the roads before they were distorted and full of checkpoints. So one of the objects of my writing has been to describe the landscape as it was before. Then also, they might not be aware of how we got into the legal situation that we are in now. It’s important to remove the mystery and explain that it was a slow process, which was deliberate. When you talk about the process, you’re specifically referring to the building of settlements in the West Bank? That’s a big part of it. Other parts are how the present generation of Palestinians have never met an Israeli who is not a settler or a soldier. There were times when Israelis came over to Ramallah and to other places in the West Bank and Gaza, and went to restaurants and had businesses with Palestinians. There was interaction on many levels. Now none of this is possible because of the apartheid wall, and because of the checkpoints. Many Palestinians have never been to Jerusalem from Ramallah, which is 15 kilometers away, and never met a normal Israeli civilian. So they have a distorted picture of what Israelis are. And likewise, the Israelis of the Palestinians. Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Illustration by Nicole Rifkin Read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Warm up your entire body if your hands and feet are cold. It’s the best way to protect against freezing toes and fingers. Master the treadmill with these four workouts. Use A.I. tools to redesign your living room. MEAL PLAN Linda Xiao for The New York Times The recipes in Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes this week are perfect for a busy time of year when you need fortification at the end of the day — especially, she writes, if you live in a place where there’s already snow on the ground. This shortcut beef biryani from Kay Chun transforms the dish from an hourlong engagement into something you can make quickly. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was mangled. Can you put eight historical events — including Michelangelo’s snowman, Queen Elizabeth’s gingerbread cookies and Apollo 11’s fruitcake — 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. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 26, 2025 Author Members Posted December 26, 2025 December 22, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The U.S. Coast Guard tried to intercept an oil tanker linked to Venezuela, but it sent distress signals and sailed toward the Atlantic Ocean, officials said. Read what happened. Also, President Trump’s donors have benefited from his return to office. And many Americans are struggling to afford the things they need. There’s more news below. But before we get to it, I’d like to make like my mother and caution you against the flu. It’s out there! A flu shot. Kristian Thacker for The New York Times It’s the season The flu came early this year. Britain, Australia and Japan have already seen spikes. The United States appears not far behind. New York City and its suburbs recently recorded some of the highest levels of flulike illness in the United States, my colleagues report. (A private school in Brooklyn closed for two days earlier this month after roughly a third of students became ill.) The numbers aren’t great in Louisiana or Colorado either. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows spikes in Denver and in New Orleans and Lafayette, La. The dominant strain of the flu virus circulating this season is H3N2 subclade K, reports Dani Blum, who covers health. H3N2 is a common strain. But the new variant — that subclade — is a doozy. It may enable the virus to spread more widely. The flu shot may not stop you from getting subclade K, but it helps guard against becoming seriously sick. Here’s mom again: Get that jab. How bad is it this year? In Britain, where I’ve been for the last week, the flu season started so early and has accelerated so quickly that the tabloids here are calling it the “super flu.” (I’ve been working by open windows and dropping vitamin C tablets into my water — which does basically nothing, but makes me feel proactive.) It’s too soon to know if the same will happen in the United States, an expert told Dani. But there are a lot of infections, and we’re still weeks from when doctors generally see high-water marks for the illness. In 2024, New York City didn’t have 10,000 laboratory-reported cases of flu until late December. This year, the city crossed that threshold three weeks ago. “It’s earlier and faster this year, and the trajectory is much quicker than usual,” the chief of public health and epidemiology at Northwell Health said. Symptoms and treatment Vaccines remain the best way to protect yourself from the flu, perhaps during the holiday season especially. You’ll come into contact with more people than usual on the plane, at the train station or if you're singing carols in a hall. Who knows who’s carrying? Experts say the best time to get vaccinated is in early fall. Still: “I tell patients that it is generally never too late to get it,” an infectious disease specialist told my colleague Maggie Astor, a health reporter. “Some protection is better than none.” And there are additional ways to avoid risks. Dani knows them well: Frequently washing hands, wearing a mask in crowds and improving ventilation as much as possible — by opening windows, if it’s not too cold, or running air purifiers — can minimize the risk of catching the flu. So can disinfecting hard surfaces like phones, doorknobs and countertops, where the flu virus can linger for over a day. Based on the symptoms, it’s hard to distinguish the flu from other respiratory illnesses. But the flu often comes on quickly, the way a truck might hit you in a crosswalk. There are now at-home tests that detect both Covid and the flu. Those are helpful because you can treat the flu virus with an antiviral medication like Tamiflu. (Would that we had something similar for the common cold.) Stay safe, everyone. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. THE LATEST NEWS Politics In Phoenix. Jordan Gale for The New York Times A conservative conference revealed fractures in Trump’s movement. Infighting over antisemitism, free speech and bigotry presents a challenge for Vice President JD Vance, who could run to succeed Trump in 2028. CBS News pulled a “60 Minutes” segment about the Trump administration’s deporting of Venezuelan men after the new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, requested changes. A correspondent called the move political. War in Ukraine In Moscow. Anastasia Barashkova/Reuters A senior Russian general was killed in Moscow after a bomb exploded under his car. Russia dismissed reports of progress in peace talks that included American and Ukrainian officials. More International News The two gunmen who killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney also threw homemade pipe bombs into the crowd, though the explosives didn’t detonate. A steward of silver at the French presidential palace is facing charges of stealing precious items that were later found in his locker, car and home. Other Big Stories Heavy rains caused flash floods in Northern California, killing at least one person, officials said. A man was arrested after a killing with a bow and arrow in Kearny, N.J. The police took him into custody after an intense overnight standoff. After 30 years, New York City is saying goodbye to the MetroCard, the colorful piece of plastic that has been swiped at turnstiles since 1994. WHAT TRUMP’S DONORS GOT Political candidates generally fund-raise so they can run strong campaigns and, if all goes well, be elected. So why solicit donations once you’re already in office? For most second-term presidents, fund-raising tapers after inauguration. Not so for Trump, who has raised nearly $2 billion since being re-elected. (That likely eclipses the amount he raised to support his 2024 campaign.) The Times traced more than half a billion dollars’ worth of those donations back to 346 donors. We found that most of them had benefited from the Trump administration’s actions since he retook office. See who gave the money and how the Trump administration is using it. OPINIONS Studio Ski This is the year millennials officially got old, Anna Silman writes. Shopping was once leisure time where buying was optional. As it moved online, it’s become a chore, Robin Givhan writes. Ezra Klein argues the Trump vibe shift is dead. The Times Sale starts now: 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 Lillian and Arnold Mercado in New York City. James Estrin/The New York Times Lessons in love: We spoke to couples who have been married for 30 years or more about how they did it. The trouble in tourism: The American travel industry is stressed. Fewer international travelers came to the United States this year — 4.5 million fewer compared with 2024. (Last year, those visitors spent nearly $179 billion on travel in the United States, a number that is expected to be $6 billion lower in 2025.) “May was terrible. June was terrible. July was terrible. August was terrible, September and October and November,” a bike tour operation in Key West, Fla., told The Times. “That’s not going to pay the rent.” Viennese cafes: The old-school spots feel tired, some residents say. Check out the new bakeries taking over the Austrian capital. Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about Bowen Yang, who is leaving “Saturday Night Live.” Metropolitan Diary: Alone on the train in the dark. A teacher: Betty Reid Soskin, the nation’s oldest park ranger, educated the public about people of color who served the U.S. and would often wear her ranger uniform when off duty. She died at 104. TODAY’S NUMBER In San Diego. Erin Schaff/The New York Times 22 — That is the number of states where Uber allows people convicted of violent felonies, child abuse, assault and other crimes to drive if the offenses are more than seven years old, a Times investigation found. Some passengers have accused the drivers of rape. SPORTS College sports: The Iowa State basketball player Audi Crooks recorded her third 40-point game this season. N.F.L.: Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf appeared to grab a fan and swing upward at him in a sideline confrontation during a game against the Detroit Lions. N.B.A.: The Chicago Bulls and the Atlanta Hawks combined for more than 300 points in a high-scoring thriller. Somehow, the game ended on a missed shot. RECIPE OF THE DAY Rachel Vanni for The New York Times Shakshuka is one of the great eggs-for-dinner affairs, particularly in this variation, which adds protein and heartiness in the form of white beans. (A sliced jalapeño brings heat.) It’s pantry cooking of the first order: Those canned beans and a jarred marinara sauce mean you can get the meal on the table in well under an hour, with toast, rice or couscous on the side. A word on the eggs you add at the end: Watch them closely. The recipe calls for seven to nine minutes to set the whites and the yolks, but your mileage may vary. On my stove, with my pan, they’re done at around six minutes. Garnish with chopped cilantro if that’s your bag, and enjoy. THEY SWEAR BY IT The New York Times To determine U.S. movie ratings, which range from G to NC-17, the Motion Picture Association examines onscreen violence, sex, nudity, drug use and crude language, keeping a tally of expletives. For films that want a PG-13 rating, the board keeps an eye on one expletive in particular, because in a PG-13 movie there can be only one. (For an R rating, there is no such restriction. “Uncut Gems” has 560.) Filmmakers often want that PG-13 rating. It means more young people can see the film, which means higher returns at the box office. Screenwriters compete for the funniest or most dramatic deployment of it. Actors want to be the one to say it; fans delight in tracking it. In test screenings, filmmakers note which time the word gets the biggest laugh and circle it on the script — that’s the one. Julia Jacobs, who covers the arts, looked at how moviemakers decide where and when the word is used. “It never fails to boost the amperage of a line,” the playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner told her. More on culture James Ransone, who found fame playing Ziggy Sobotka on “The Wire,” has died at 46. His death is being investigated as a suicide. The Rockettes are turning 100. Our dance critic Gia Kourlas went to Radio City Music Hall to see how they’re faring: “As the night wore on, the Rockettes, an American institution, started to feel like Santa’s arm candy instead of the accomplished dancers they are.” “Karen” went home. “Snowflake” melted. There’s a new political put-down circulating: “Theater kid,” a way of labeling an opponent as dramatic and performative without having to use those words, according to one Republican strategist. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS The “Family Guy” seasonal special is a parody of Hallmark Channel holiday movies. Hulu Stream a TV holiday special — from “Family Guy,” the English National Ballet or other practitioners of seasonal happiness. Sprint toward the holidays with one of these great gifts for runners, selected by the deal chasers at Wirecutter. Ease the pain of a holiday-season breakup with one of these books recommended by psychologists, therapists and dating coaches. Take our news quiz and our 2025 faces quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were backlot and bootblack. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. I’ll be back in the States tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 27, 2025 Author Members Posted December 27, 2025 December 23, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. President Trump announced a new class of Navy warships that would be named for himself. CBS is in turmoil after its top editor, Bari Weiss, pulled a “60 Minutes” segment. And Jim Beam is shutting down its main distillery for all of next year, as the whiskey market is struggling. Before we get to that, though, I’d like to turn your attention to wind farms and what they say about the Trump administration. Off the coast of Rhode Island. Lucy Lu for The New York Times Without evidence President Trump doesn’t like wind farms. Never has. He thinks they’re ugly. He calls them inefficient and expensive. Years ago, he failed to stop the construction of one that’s visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland. He was apoplectic about it. He told a Scottish politician on Twitter in 2014 that “the windmill hovering over hole 14 is disgusting & inappropriate.” On his first day in office this year, Trump stopped new wind projects on public lands and waters. A judge called that order “arbitrary” and said it violated federal law. Still, Trump persevered. Yesterday his administration said it would halt leases for five wind farms under construction off the East Coast, virtually gutting the offshore wind industry in the United States. The projects were “expected to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses,” my colleagues Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman report. Perhaps in order not to appear arbitrary, Doug Burgum, the secretary of the interior, said that the decision “addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our East Coast population centers.” Based on what evidence? The Pentagon has produced classified reports, Burgum said, and the Energy Department has found that wind farms could interfere with radar systems. Is this true? Military studies have indeed shown that offshore wind turbines could disrupt radar, Lisa told me. But they concluded that the risk could be offset with planning. A spokesman for one of the wind farms said it had worked “in close coordination with the military.” He pointed out that his project’s two pilot turbines had been operating for five years with no impact on national security. It is not the first time the administration has justified a new policy — one it wanted to impose quickly without fretting over legal and regulatory procedures — with a broad claim. It just asserts there’s a problem. A fixation Wind turbine bases in Virginia. Steve Helber/Associated Press Trump has given many reasons to dislike wind farms, but so far none are backed by agreed-upon facts. Here’s a look at his views: “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value,” he said in 2019. “And they say the noise causes cancer.” “If you love birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill because it’s a very sad, sad sight. It’s like a cemetery,” he continued. “In California, if you shoot a bald eagle, they put you in jail for five years. And yet the windmills, they wipe them all out.” “The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously,” he said in January. (Maybe, but the administration has also weakened habitat protections, ended automatic protections for threatened species and said economic factors should take priority in decisions about endangered species.) The rationales In explaining a range of new policies, the president has pointed to grounds that don’t draw from evidence, or at least not evidence the public can see. Wind farms: These need to be stopped because of radar “clutter.” See above. Illegal immigrants: Some have been selected for deportation because the government has said they belong to a gang — without proving it. Boat strikes: The administration says the nearly 100 boats destroyed off South America were running drugs to the United States. It hasn’t released any evidence for that claim. National Guard deployments: Trump says protesters in a number of Democratic-led cities have threatened the safety of immigration agents and government facilities. Judges have chastised officials for not providing evidence for these assertions. Alien Enemies Act: The administration says the presence of Venezuelan gang members in the United States constitutes an “invasion” by a “hybrid criminal state” that allows him to invoke this wartime law, reminds my colleague Mattathias Schwartz, who covers legal affairs. But U.S. intelligence agencies have said Venezuela is not directing gang activity. Refugees: Trump has shut down most refugee admissions but is letting in white Afrikaners based on a claim of genocide against them that is not backed by evidence, says my colleague Zolan Kanno-Youngs, who covers the White House. Liberal nonprofits: Vice President JD Vance and others say these groups support political violence — again without providing evidence. It all adds up to what you might call a governance of assertion. That is: Trust, but don’t verify. Now, let’s see what else is going on in the world. THE LATEST NEWS China The Pentagon and American A.I. companies share a weakness: They both desperately need China’s batteries. The Trump administration banned sales of foreign-made drones, including a popular brand from China. A federal judge in Brooklyn declared a mistrial in the case of Linda Sun, a former aide to Democratic governors who was accused of working for China. Trump Administration in Texas. Meridith Kohut for The New York Times The Trump administration is considering giving nearly 800 acres of land in a wildlife refuge in Texas to SpaceX to expand its rocket launch and production site, documents show. The Education Department will investigate safety standards at Brown University following a shooting there. Diplomacy Trump appointed a special envoy to Greenland, part of his efforts to take over the Danish territory. Officials in Denmark and Greenland were furious. The Trump administration has ordered nearly 30 ambassadors to leave their posts by mid-January. The union representing career diplomats said such a mass recall had never happened before. Health The F.D.A. approved a pill version of the injectable weight-loss drug Wegovy. Around 50 Planned Parenthood locations shut down this year, largely as a result of Republican efforts. Click the video below to watch Caroline Kitchener explain how Christian anti-abortion centers are filling the void. The New York Times Immigration A judge ruled that the Trump administration must either help bring back a group of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador or let them challenge their deportations in U.S. courts. Many Sikh immigrants are truckers in the United States. Their jobs are under threat. Assad Regime Aaron Byrd Syrian officials who brutalized hundreds of thousands of people during Bashar al-Assad’s regime have fled the country. Today, many are reveling at places like the Four Seasons in Moscow, a Times investigation found. Assad himself has been living and dining in luxury — in secluded villas and gleaming skyscrapers, guarded by Russian security services. Other Big Stories Larry Ellison, the billionaire father of Paramount’s chief executive, made a personal guarantee to provide the roughly $40 billion in equity that Paramount is offering in its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. The U.S. Army for years put inexperienced pilots in aging helicopters and flew them over the nation’s capital, a Times investigation found. IN ONE MAP During the Biden administration, most deportations happened at the border: Migrants who had crossed into the U.S. were quickly sent away. In the Trump era, though, the border has gotten much quieter. So the administration has set out to arrest and deport far more people from the interior of the country. The map above shows what that new deportation system looks like, as people are transferred between immigrant detention facilities across the U.S. and then sent out of the country from a handful of hubs in the South. Read the story. OPINIONS Christians are frustrated with the media’s simplistic depictions of them, Molly Worthen writes. Here is a column by Thomas Edsall on how Trump’s policies could kill his own supporters. The Times Sale starts now: 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 In Naples. Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times A new face at the manger: In Naples, Nativity scenes sometimes include miniature statues of celebrities and politicians. This year, Trump is a popular addition. Ghosting ChatGPT: The woman behind the MyBoyfriendIsAI online community isn’t dating (or sexting) her A.I. boyfriend anymore. She found something more fulfilling. Street art: Two new murals attributed to Banksy have appeared in central London. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about the U.S. military’s pursuit of a tanker linked to Venezuela. A singer-songwriter: Chris Rea, a British rocker whose hits included the ballad “Driving Home for Christmas,” died at 74. TODAY’S NUMBER 5-millionths — That’s how much of a second the atomic clocks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. — some of the most accurate in the world — fell out of sync last week because of a power outage. SPORTS N.F.L.: The Buffalo Bills, the Los Angeles Chargers and the Jacksonville Jaguars are headed to the playoffs after the Indianapolis Colts lost to the San Francisco 49ers. Hockey: Players in one of the top minor hockey leagues in North America could go on strike Friday. They have been playing without a collective bargaining agreement since the start of the season. RECIPE OF THE DAY Sam Sifton’s beef rib roast. Romulo Yanes for The New York Times This was my father’s recipe until it became mine, and I hope it’ll become yours and then someone else’s: prime rib, one of the holiday season’s most handsome and delicious proteins. It is also one of the most expensive, so don’t even think of proceeding without an instant-read probe thermometer at your side. Protect the investment! Pull the roast from the oven at 120 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit and allow it to rest, continuing to cook as it does, until the internal temperature has reached 125 or so for medium rare. Definitely make Yorkshire pudding with the fat rendered in the roasting pan. WHO IS SYDNEY SWEENEY? Sydney Sweeney as the title character in “The Housemaid.” Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate Sydney Sweeney is one of the most perplexing figures in the movies today, writes Esther Zuckerman: a bombshell actress who has been hailed and vilified for what might be her real-life political views, and whose work onscreen often challenges the patriarchy. “The right-wing crowd has deemed her a hero, the left-wing one a pariah,” Esther writes, “and lost in all of this is what she’s doing in her true profession: acting.” Sweeney is a blank slate, in other words. Which makes her both a promising star and someone who can be whoever the fans want her to be. Cue Michael Jordan: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” More on culture It was a year of big headlines, but consider these small shifts, mini trends and under-the-radar developments that reveal a new cultural atmosphere. Cigarettes are back (at least onscreen). Woke is gone. Plastic surgery’s no secret. Maybe college is a waste of money. There’s a lot here to debate and discuss. Is “Jingle All the Way,” the unhinged 1996 action comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman and Rita Wilson, the perfect good-bad holiday movie? My colleague Maya Salam makes the case. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS The New York Times Watch our critic Jon Caramanica break down the emotional manipulation of the A.I.-generated Black Christian soul singer Solomon Ray. Ray’s — or “Ray’s” — “Find Your Rest” is our song of the week. Improve your running, and avoid injury, with these simple exercises. Discover the most popular products the testifying experts at Wirecutter uncovered this year. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were clunked and knuckled. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 28, 2025 Author Members Posted December 28, 2025 December 24, 2025 By Sam Sifton Good morning. A coalition of 19 states sued to block the Trump administration’s plan to strip federal funding from hospitals providing gender-related care for minors. Trump’s campaign against tankers is paralyzing Venezuela’s oil industry. And Volodymyr Zelensky said he was open to a demilitarized zone in eastern Ukraine. We’ll get to more news below. But first, let’s visit the White House. By The New York Times Welcome to the Oval Office President Trump has been redecorating the Oval Office. He’s almost out of wall space. He has made it an extravagant room. Gold is everywhere: on picture frames and gilded carvings, on seals and antiques and finials. The metal covers about a third of the walls. “He’s a maximalist,” Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, told The Times. Flags are abundant. There are five times as many as most other presidents displayed. A gold-framed copy of the Declaration of Independence hangs to the right of the Resolute Desk. Portraits abound in the Oval, more than 20 of them, mostly of presidents past. Trump has regularly added and swapped out items in the room, and he has recently added a portrait of the former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. It hangs by the fireplace, the only image of a woman in the Oval. A gold statuette of an eagle flying over the Constitution arrived last month near the flags behind the desk. A wooden box with a red button sits on it, near a golden presidential seal. When Trump presses the button, a valet comes quickly with a glass of Diet Coke and ice on a gleaming silver tray. Gold is a metaphor the president uses to telegraph his success, an art historian who specializes in art during Louis XIV’s France told The Times. “He’s really setting up a kind of stage — a gilded stage for his presidency,” he said. Please, sit Doug Mills/The New York Tmies The extravagance of Trump’s interior decoration may see its apex around the fireplace, where he has played host to more than two dozen world leaders since January. Golden antiques cover the mantel. Nearby, credenzas bear golden feet beneath golden appliqués on the wall. A bust of Winston Churchill sits behind the president’s chair. A portrait of George Washington looms above the fireplace. Additional gold carvings and trim on the mantel appeared in March. By August, there was a gilded fireplace screen. The Oval Office has never been plain, of course. But the difference between Trump’s version of it and the one presented by previous presidents is stark. Behind closed doors The room is also more insular now. In past administrations, aides used a small peephole in one of the doors leading to other parts of the West Wing, allowing them to monitor the progress of meetings. Trump has blocked it with new mirrors. If the door is closed now, they cannot see what is happening in the room. All the gold — on those mirrors, on the frames of the portraits beside them, in the inlaid seal on the coffee table — has led to rumors that they’re just cheap plastic, painted gold. Trump denies it, and a White House official told The Times that while the underlying materials are made of plaster or metal, they are covered in real gold leaf. I dug this detail: A craftsman from Florida regularly travels to the White House to gild parts of the Oval Office by hand, often when the president is away on weekends. Take a look around Doug Mills/The New York Times To document the extent of the Oval Office renovations, and to allow us to explore the room at home, Doug Mills, our longtime White House photographer, took more than 600 overlapping photographs of the room. On a single day in October, he shot from every angle imaginable to capture the complexity of the renovation and the details within it. Then a team of Times journalists got to work bringing them to life. (You should know their names: Ashley Wu, Junho Lee, Marco Hernandez, Katie Rogers and Mika Gröndahl.) Doug captured images of objects from multiple angles. The Times team used a computer program that processed the overlapping photos to determine the location of objects in 3-D space. The program then synthesized this information into a single 3-D representation of the office. A lot of reporting, design work and coding followed. And now you can explore a 360-degree view of Trump’s Oval Office here. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. EPSTEIN FILES The Justice Department released nearly 30,000 more pages from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, and Times reporters spent yesterday digging through them. Here are some takeaways: A royal inquiry. In newly released emails, someone calling himself “A” who claims to be staying at a British royal residence asks Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, if she has “found me some new inappropriate friends.” Those details and more in the messages match those of Prince Andrew, who was recently stripped of his title because of his ties to Epstein. Trump’s presence. The records contain hundreds of references to Trump. Many are mentions in news reports, but some are more narrowly focused on the president, who was once a friend of Epstein’s. They included a 2020 email from a federal prosecutor saying that Trump had flown on Epstein’s jet “many more times than previously has been reported” — although those trips have since become public knowledge. Hasty censoring: Some of the files released were improperly redacted, with portions of censored information easily revealed by copying and pasting blacked-out text into a separate file. The deputy attorney general said the Justice Department was sifting through nearly a million pages of documents from the investigation. More releases have been promised. THE LATEST NEWS Politics Students at commencement. Sophie Park for The New York Times Next month, the Trump administration will begin to garnish the pay of borrowers who have defaulted on their student loans. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it had made more than 29,000 cuts to the government. But federal spending went up on its watch. Ben Sasse, a Republican former senator from Nebraska, announced that he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He is 53. National Guard The Supreme Court refused to let Trump deploy hundreds of National Guard troops in Chicago, casting doubt on the viability of deployments in other cities. Just after the ruling, Louisiana’s governor announced that about 350 National Guard troops will be deployed to New Orleans before New Year’s Eve and will stay through at least February. Tech Regulation The Trump administration imposed travel bans on five Europeans involved in monitoring major tech platforms. A federal judge has blocked Texas from enforcing a law requiring app stores to verify users’ ages. International On Bondi Beach. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times The Australian state that includes Sydney has passed laws that further restrict gun ownership and allow the police to shut down protests following the attacks on Bondi Beach. Thailand is framing its attacks on Cambodia as a war against scam centers. The U.N. warns the strikes endanger trafficked workers. Celebrities Lawyers for Sean Combs have appealed his conviction on prostitution-related charges, arguing that the sexual encounters were consensual and that his sentence was too harsh. The British authorities have charged the comedian Russell Brand with two new counts of sexual assault, in addition to the five counts he was already facing. Other Big Stories The New York Times Will it be a white Christmas this year? Maybe if you live in Wisconsin or Minnesota. The Times is tracking the likelihood of snow across the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. economy grew at a robust pace through the end of September, despite widespread concerns about affordability among households. The University of Oklahoma fired an instructor for failing a student’s paper on gender issues that heavily cited the Bible. (Read the essay here.) How do tiny, delicate monarch butterflies navigate as they migrate for thousands of miles? In the video below, Alexa Robles-Gil explains how researchers are examining the butterflies’ brains to find answers. Click to play. The New York Times OPINIONS Standing together for a free and religiously pluralist society is a Christmas thing to do, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes. This was the year when Americans from the left and the right revolted against tried-and-true processes, John Fabian Witt writes. The Times Sale starts now: 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 Alex Merto The masculinity crisis: Parul Sehgal looks at how a 2006 book by Norah Vincent, “Self-Made Man,” presaged the manosphere. The memoir’s about Vincent’s time spent disguised as a man in male-only spaces, and it has taken off recently. “In the view of her new fans, Vincent is the rare woman who gets it, who can cop to male pain because she has experienced it,” Parul writes, before quoting a Reddit post from one of them: “She truly understood us in ways that most of society can’t.” Read the whole essay. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about two new murals attributed to Banksy. A night at the opera: The Metropolitan Opera is courting influencers in an attempt to attract a younger audience. A filmmaker: Robert Nakamura, known as the godfather of Asian American media, drew on his childhood experience in an internment camp during World War II to explore themes of identity and racism. He died at 88. TODAY’S NUMBER 112.5 billion — That is how many pieces of mail and packages the U.S. Postal Service — an agency that’s part Santa Claus, part federal emissary — delivered last year. SPORTS College football: Former Georgia defensive end Damon Wilson II has sued the school’s athletic association, alleging that the Bulldogs tried to punish him for entering the transfer portal. Golf: Brooks Koepka, a five-time major champion, is leaving LIV Golf, citing family reasons. RECIPE OF THE DAY Linda Xiao for The New York Times I love a secret ingredient — a few tablespoons of peanut butter in the chili, a sprinkle of espresso powder in the chocolate chip cookie dough, some grated nutmeg in the creamed spinach. In this lovely recipe for a lemony chicken-feta meatball soup, the magic element is rolled oats, which replace breadcrumbs in the meatballs, making them light and tender, and helping thicken the broth around them. Garnish with a ton of dill and a big squeeze of lemon juice. Deck the halls! BACK IN THE GAME Kate Hudson Thea Traff for The New York Times Kate Hudson spent decades pigeonholed as a rom-com queen. “Every time I tried to pivot, the industry continued to see me in a certain way,” she told Brooks Barnes, who covers Hollywood. “It’s just the way the town works — how you’re branded.” Until you’re not. Hudson now stars in “Song Sung Blue,” playing a middle-aged, blue-collar amputee who sings backup in a kitschy Neil Diamond cover band. “Through genuine word of mouth, not the publicist-orchestrated prattle that often drives awards season consensus, Hollywood insiders are saying it’s the best work of her career,” Brooks writes. More on culture Our critic Dwight Garner strolled through Betty Fussell’s memoir of old age, “How to Cook a Coyote,” for The New York Times Book Review. One of the lessons he drew from it is how hard Fussell strives, at 98, to keep her sense of humor intact. “It functions like the little mesh on the halved lemon that keeps the pips from falling into your oysters,” he writes. Michael Paulson, our theater reporter, conducted an excellent post-mortem for “The Queen of Versailles,” the biggest-budget production to open on Broadway in the fall. The musical, which starred Kristin Chenoweth, closed last weekend. Investors lost millions. What happened? Michael tells the tale. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Marshall, left, and Francis in Adult Swim’s “Common Side Effects.” Adult Swim Watch “Common Side Effects,” a conspiracy thriller about an awkward, bearded, small-mouthed mycologist named Marshall, on Adult Swim. It’s one of our critic Maya Phillips’s best animated shows and movies of 2025. Replace your surge protector, your plastic cutting board, your broom. The caretakers at Wirecutter want your home safe, clean and comfortable. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was docility. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. I’m off until the new year, but my colleagues will take very good care of your need for news and distraction while I’m gone. Happy holidays! — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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 December 28, 2025 Author Members Posted December 28, 2025 December 25, 2025 Good morning, and merry Christmas. Sam is away. Today through the end of the year, we’ll be showcasing some of The Times’s best work of 2025. Clockwise from top left, Pope Leo XIV; Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump; wildfires in California; Zohran Mamdani. Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times, Doug Mills/The New York Times, Philip Cheung for The New York Times, Shuran Huang for The New York Times Your top stories By Lauren Jackson I’m an editor for this newsletter. The list of our most-read stories reflects who we were in 2025. It shows what we were curious about, what we longed for and, above all, what mattered to us. This year, what mattered to our readers was the news. Of the top 25 most-clicked stories at The New York Times in 2025, all but one was about a major news story. A new pope. The election of a young, democratic socialist mayor in New York. The fires that ravaged Los Angeles. The search for an attacker — in killing after killing after killing. Only one story that wasn’t news broke into the top of the pack. That was our list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century so far. Below, we recap the year in news. The biggest stories These were the news stories that readers clicked the most, in chronological order. In Altadena, Calif. Erin Schaff/The New York Times Fires: Readers tracked the fires that consumed parts of Los Angeles at the beginning of the year. Government employees: The government offered two million federal workers payouts to resign. Gene Hackman: The authorities recovered the bodies of the actor Gene Hackman and his wife in their New Mexico home. They died of natural causes, investigators concluded, but readers followed the details of their deaths closely. An Oval Office meeting: President Trump berated Volodymyr Zelensky in a televised moment in the Oval Office. An explosive cabinet meeting: Trump officials clashed with Elon Musk and sought the president’s favor. A new pope: Robert Francis Prevost became the first American pope. He took the name Leo XIV. Assassinated Democrat: Readers followed the manhunt after a political assassination in Minnesota. Iran: Trump bombed nuclear-enrichment sites in Iran. Charlie Kirk: People were interested in the search for the shooter who killed Charlie Kirk. Jimmy Kimmel: ABC suspended the late night host Jimmy Kimmel after he implied that the suspect in Kirk’s killing was a conservative, before much was known about him. Zohran Mamdani: New York City elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor. The best escapes While news dominated the top of the list, you loved other types of journalism, too. In the Dolomites. Oliver Whone Our 52 places to go in 2025 list. The Dolomites, in Italy, were one of the picks. Four weird signs you’re getting older. And 10 small things neurologists wish you would do for your brain. They say it’s never too late to start. The ones you lingered on These are the stories you spent the most time with. Edie Baskin, Ken Regan, Ken Kneitel and Anne P. Beatts; via the Lorne Michaels Collection/Harry Ransom Center How noise complaints from parrots in a Manhattan co-op led to a $750,000 legal settlement and a shattered friendship. A look at the history of “Saturday Night Live.” She was ready to have her 15th child. Then came the felony charges. The ones you passed around These are the stories you shared the most. Illustrations by Todd St. John Have we been thinking about A.D.H.D. all wrong? These words — including female and L.G.B.T.Q. — are disappearing in the Trump administration. The conversations you joined These are some of the stories you commented on most. Nadia Pillon “My timeshare is an albatross. How do I get rid of it?” Readers had feelings. Readers also answered the question “My neighbors’ kids are driving me crazy! How do I get some quiet?” Commenters weren’t thrilled that A.I. scanners were working to ensure you pay for every ding on a rental car. THE LATEST NEWS Politics The Justice Department said that it discovered over a million more files potentially related to the Epstein investigation, and that reviewing them could take weeks. The deadline to release files was last Friday. Trump’s recent seizures of oil tankers near Venezuela appear to bend international maritime laws and customs, legal experts say. Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky unveiled a revised peace plan, portraying it as Ukraine’s best effort to end the war with Russia. Here’s why Russia is likely to reject it. The composer of “Carol of the Bells” lived in Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine. Russian assaults are erasing markers of his legacy. More International News Pope Leo on Christmas Eve. Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Pope Leo criticized the globalized economy in his first Christmas Eve Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. Honduras said that Nasry Asfura, a former mayor endorsed by Trump, had narrowly won the country’s presidential election. Other Big Stories In Los Angeles. Apu Gomes/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images An intense storm drenched Southern California, causing flash floods that closed roads. Some residents were forced to evacuate. A single ticket matched all six numbers in yesterday’s Powerball drawing, winning the second-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever — $1.817 billion. OPINIONS Kristen Soltis Anderson explores why Americans say they want a different approach to politics but vote for more of the same. Want to have a sane, thoughtful conversation with that relative whose opinions you don’t share? Mark Edmundson offers some tips. The Times Sale starts now: 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 In Norway. David B. Torch for The New York Times Winter wonderland: Discover Norway’s Troll Trail, a 100-mile journey that includes stunning vistas, snowbound mountain hotels and waffles. Father-son deal-making: Larry and David Ellison are pushing to make a $108 billion megadeal together. But they didn’t always have a close relationship. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about the redecorated Oval Office. TODAY’S NUMBER 75 — That’s how many migrants Palau, a tiny island nation in the Pacific, agreed to take from the U.S. In return, the Trump administration will give Palau $7.5 million. SPORTS Golf: Masashi “Jumbo” Ozaki, a World Golf Hall of Famer, died at 78. N.F.L.: The league said it was still reviewing the behavior of a fan recently involved in a conflict with the Pittsburgh Steelers receiver DK Metcalf. RECIPE OF THE DAY Christopher Testani for The New York Times We’ve got a great way for you to use that leftover ham from the holidays: Make this hearty ham and bean soup. The pork, combined with vegetables and herbs, make for a rich and flavorful stock. (For extra flavor, sub in chicken broth for the water. You’ll see.) REAL-LIFE MARTY Marty Reisman Donald F. Holway/The New York Times Timothée Chalamet has spent weeks on a relentless press tour for “Marty Supreme,” his electrifying new movie about table tennis. (Our critic Manohla Dargis calls it “one of the most thoroughly pleasurable American movies of the year.”) Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a table-tennis shark and aspiring world champion. The year is 1952. The place, New York. Our reporter Matt Flegenheimer saw the promos and knew Chalamet’s character seemed familiar. Turns out, Matt once interviewed the guy — the real guy, Marty Reisman, who inspired Chalamet’s character. Matt calls him “the most interesting person I’ve interviewed.” Read more about the guy behind the movie. More on culture This year’s best fight scenes have one thing in common: They feature ordinary men who resort to violence because they don’t know how to communicate. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS In Altadena, Calif. Brandon Tauszik for The New York Times Take a walk down Christmas Tree Lane and see how a California community revived a holiday tradition after a devastating fire. Try a coquito, a rum and coconut drink that is a staple of New York’s Puerto Rican community. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were warping and wrapping. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell News Assistant: Lyna Bentahar Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren 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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