Members phkrause Posted January 22 Author Members Posted January 22 January 21, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. President Trump is late to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His plane turned around last night because of an electrical issue, and he is now expected to land about three hours behind schedule to give a speech. (Follow the latest updates here.) He’ll arrive to a diplomatic uproar over Greenland. Yesterday, Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, offered stark remarks about the end of an American-led world order and received a standing ovation. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, wore aviator sunglasses and said France would not capitulate to Trump’s bullying. Trump’s fight with allies coincides with the first anniversary of the beginning of his second term. I’d like to start there. The New York Times Trump 2.0 The past year has arguably been the most disruptive and consequential period for the United States government in many of our lifetimes. That is the story of 2025, Jonathan Swan said on “The Daily” recently: “Donald Trump aggressively asserting power and largely succeeding.” During his first 365 days back in office, Trump did not simply smash norms and ignore laws meant to ensure the balance of power in the government. He placed punishing tariffs on dozens of countries (friends and foes alike), undermined the independence of the Federal Reserve and the Department of Justice, cut funding to universities and slashed the federal work force. He dropped out of the Paris Climate Agreement, opened nearly a million square miles of ocean floor to drilling and tried to stop new wind power projects. He sent the National Guard into some American cities to police the citizenry. He sent ICE and the Border Patrol into others to round up immigrants. He had more than 100 people killed who he said were smuggling drugs in the Caribbean. He removed Venezuela’s leader from office and said the United States would take that country’s oil. He threatened to grab Greenland by force. (That’s the big stuff. There are dozens of surprising smaller changes, too.) And he did much of it, Luke Broadwater reported, from the glittery stage of the Oval Office, where he often played host to “a veritable reality show with a revolving cast of world leaders.” Testing limits Trump uses executive power in ways that it has not been used before. He believes, my colleague Charlie Savage wrote, “that presidents have absolute power over executive branch decision-making — even if Congress has enacted laws giving some independent discretion to officials at departments or agencies.” Charlie’s kinetic Venn diagram explains his attempts to expand his power into numerous categories. When Trump calls for criminal investigations of his enemies, for instance, he both weaponizes the government and insists on greater executive control of the Justice Department. Sometimes he calls for powers that have traditionally resided with Congress — the mass firing of civil servants, say, or the dismissal of members of agencies that are meant to be independent of the executive branch. Other times, he calls upon the military without consulting the legislators, as when he bombed Iran or removed Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. He steps on congressional toes with immigration, too, using a law meant for wartime to deport people without due process. He has moved to end birthright citizenship, though it’s guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Some of these attempts sit with the courts, but most have proceeded while his opposition squawks. For Jonathan, again speaking on “The Daily,” that suggests things won’t go back to the way they were before. “We’re in an environment where there’s not a huge constituency for a restorationist president, for people to say, ‘Oh, actually, I really hope the next president will voluntarily restrain themselves and exercise prudence and respect the balance of powers,’” he said. Economic effects Ben Casselman, our chief economics reporter, has also used the past to think about the future. “Much more so than in his first four years in office,” he wrote yesterday, “Mr. Trump has begun his second term with what amounts to an all-out assault” on institutions and policies “that have long been seen by leaders of both major political parties as the foundations of American economic strength.” Economists across the political spectrum warned that Trump “is setting the country on a path that will, in the long run, leave the economy less dynamic, the financial system less stable and Americans less prosperous in the decades ahead,” Ben wrote. Click the video below to watch Ben discuss Trump’s economic promises. The New York Times On language The Times examined Trump’s use of the words he said in public last year, comparing them with the ones he used in 2017, the first year of his first term. He’s speaking more, often without a script, and the words are very different. Two details from their analysis: First, Trump’s interest in international affairs has grown. Last term, for example, Trump mentioned foreign countries 2,881 times. This term, enmeshed in trade wars and closing in on Venezuela, he mentioned them 8,410 times. Second, his focus has changed. In the first term, he spoke a lot about jobs — as well as “collusion” and “leaks.” This term, he’s been talking about tariffs, inflation and A.I. That’s a lot of change. And remember, he renamed Denali, the Gulf of Mexico and the Department of Defense, too. Let’s see what this year brings. Related: Trump marked the anniversary with a speech lasting an hour and 45 minutes. “God is very proud,” he said. THE LATEST NEWS Davos The NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, said that he was working behind the scenes to resolve the furor over Trump’s threats to take Greenland, which is threatening the military alliance. He also said he still wanted the U.S. in NATO. Calls are intensifying across Europe for a strong response to Trump’s Greenland threats. “Being a happy vassal is one thing,” Belgium’s prime minister said. “Being a miserable slave is something else. Carney, Canada’s leader, showed he was willing to stand up to Trump without mentioning his name. “The middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, we’re are on the menu,” he said. Asian and European markets fell today after the world leaders’ fights, and U.S. stocks were down more than 2 percent yesterday, the biggest decline since October. More on Greenland In Greenland on Sunday. Mads Claus Rasmussen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images European nations sent a small military group to Greenland last week to show solidarity with the island. The move angered Trump. Trump’s Greenland plan is a break with modern history. “Since the days of World War I, America was the country that resisted conquest,” Peter Baker, The Times’s chief White House correspondent, writes, adding, “Now Mr. Trump aspires to put America into the category of conquerors.” Danes and Greenlanders are wearing MAGA-style red caps with the slogan “Make America Go Away” as a symbol of resistance. Minnesota Prosecutors subpoenaed at least five Democratic officials in Minnesota, including the governor and Minneapolis’s mayor, as part of a federal investigation into their response to Trump’s immigration crackdown. Masked federal agents arrested a Hmong immigrant who is a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, causing panic in St. Paul’s large Hmong community. Politics Lindsey Halligan, tapped by Trump to prosecute his enemies, left the U.S. attorney’s office. A ruling had said that she was unlawfully appointed. Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, announced that they were expecting their fourth child. Spain A Times photographer found what appeared to be a train’s undercarriage near the site of a derailment on Sunday. Experts said the part could be crucial in determining the cause. Last night, another train crash in the country killed one person and injured 37. More International News Australia passed tighter gun control laws in response to last month’s massacre at a Hanukkah celebration. The man who assassinated the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022 was sentenced to life in prison. Under pressure from Trump, Mexico sent 37 people accused of being criminal operatives to the U.S. Polls show that a majority of Latin Americans approved of the U.S. action in Venezuela. Israeli officials seized the Jerusalem headquarters of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees and oversaw the demolition of some structures in its compound. Other Big Stories Safety netting on the Golden Gate Bridge. Jim Wilson/The New York Times For decades, an average of 30 people have jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge every year. But after the installation of safety netting, there was not a single suicide in the second half of 2025. Netflix updated its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery to all cash rather than a mix of cash and stock in an attempt to outmaneuver Paramount. OPINIONS Europe has a financial weapon that could hurt the U.S. It’s time to use it, Henry J. Farrell writes. Here’s a column by Thomas Friedman on Trump’s me-first governing style. 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 A refuge lost: An arson attack destroyed a Tree of Life display at Beth Israel, the oldest synagogue in Mississippi. But it didn’t crack the kinship that members feel with one another — or with the broader faith community that has stepped in to help. From the National Archives: Nearly a dozen 18th-century documents will travel to eight cities across the U.S., aboard a jet called the Freedom Plane, to honor the 250th anniversary of American independence. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about right-wing commentators’ use of the acronym AWFUL to describe some liberal women. TODAY’S NUMBER ∞ — That is the size of the theoretical pancake two mathematicians recently sought to cut into as many pieces as possible, using very strange-looking knives. (Infinity is not a true number, of course, but I hope you’ll forgive the stretch so I can bring you both the cool symbol for it and this unusual and fascinating story.) SPORTS Olympics: In Norway, a bizarre and brazen cheating scandal has rocked the country’s ski jumping team. M.L.B.: The center fielders Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. RECIPE OF THE DAY Andrew Bui for The New York Times Crumbled Italian sausage, sage and cream make for one of the great winter flavor combinations. Toni Chapman adds to that mix garlic, onion, sautéed mushrooms, chicken stock, baby spinach and a bunch of broken super-wide pasta sheets to make up this fantastic creamy lasagna soup. A flash of red-pepper flakes brings a hint of fire, and a squeeze of lemon juice a smart ray of sunshine. I’d probably add some extra sage at the end, too. So good. A TEA PARTY The Beckham family. Scott Garfitt/Invision, via Associated Press Brooklyn Beckham, the eldest son of Victoria and David, posted explosive accusations against his parents on Instagram. It confirmed a feud — and was an earthquake that created a tsunami of memes online. Brooklyn claims that his parents have “been trying endlessly” to ruin his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz. He also said his mother danced inappropriately with him at his wedding. “I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life,” he wrote. He says he is not interested in reconciliation. David Beckham gave an oblique response from Davos. “Children are allowed to make mistakes, that’s how they learn,” he said. More on culture Julian Barnes — the novelist, not the Times reporter of the same name — has said that “Departure(s),” published yesterday, will be his last book. Dwight Garner, who reviewed it, says it “brims with wisdom reluctantly acquired.” The novel is spare, anguished. Dwight again: “It resembles a tall ship that, in the face of a storm, has taken down and stored its sails and rigging to better endure punishment.” The Metropolitan Opera will lay off workers, cut salaries and reduce its offerings. It may also sell its Chagall murals, valued at $55 million. Late night hosts cringed over Trump’s texts with world leaders. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Listen to Mitski’s new single, “Where’s My Phone?,” and seven other new songs The Times is talking about this week. Read books on a tablet this year with the best e-reader tested by the bibliophile technocrats at Wirecutter. Fall asleep faster with help from actual sleep experts and the Well team. (Forget about mouth tape!) GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were faintly, finality and infantility. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. P.S. Today, New York Times Games is introducing Crossplay, its first two-player game. Competitors take turns building words off one another and earning points to win. Download it free here. 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 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 January 24 Author Members Posted January 24 January 22, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. News continues to pour out of Davos, Switzerland. President Trump hosted a “Board of Peace” signing with nearly two dozen countries, none of them western European. (At the signing, he said some of the signees were “very popular leaders” and in “some cases not so popular.”) Experts say the board is a direct competitor to the United Nations — and the latest example of Trump’s attempt to build a new world order, with himself at the center. And yesterday, Trump took world leaders at the World Economic Forum on a roller coaster. He started the day by threatening economic warfare if he didn’t get his way on Greenland. By the evening, he said he had reached a deal with NATO to avoid that. European leaders are meeting today to discuss next steps. I’d like to start with the whiplash. At the World Economic Forum. Doug Mills/The New York Times Taking Davos Could the United States end up in possession of Greenland? After Trump gave a combative speech yesterday in Davos, Switzerland — at a forum that’s meant to foster global collaboration — it certainly seemed possible. Trump told the audience of world leaders, billionaires and other elites that he would not send troops to seize Greenland from Denmark — but said he would take it all the same, threatening anyone who stood in his way. “You can say yes and we will be very appreciative,” Trump said, “or you can say no and we will remember.” The threats — punishing tariffs chief among them — had an almost immediate effect. Just hours after the speech, Trump met with Mark Rutte, the leader of NATO, and afterward said they had devised a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region.” Now he needn’t impose tariffs on allies who refused to heed to his demands for control of Greenland, he said. The announcement followed a NATO meeting yesterday in which top military officers from the alliance’s member states discussed a compromise in which Denmark would give the United States sovereignty over small pockets of Greenlandic land, The Times reported. The United States could build military bases on them. (Britain has a similar arrangement with its bases in Cyprus.) Is that the framework of the deal Trump announced? NATO said in a statement that “negotiations between Denmark, Greenland and the United States will go forward aimed at ensuring that Russia and China never gain a foothold — economically or militarily — in Greenland.” A CNN reporter asked Trump if the deal he was pursuing would result in U.S. ownership of Greenland. Trump hesitated before replying. “It’s a long-term deal. It’s the ultimate long-term deal,” he said. How long? “Infinite. There is no time limit. It’s a deal that’s forever.” President Trump at a reception after his speech in Davos. Doug Mills/The New York Times The reviews Trump has said that the United States needs Greenland for its natural resources, for its national security and to contain Russia’s and China’s global ambitions. In an interview with The Times, he also cited a “psychological” need to possess the island. Yesterday, though, he focused on national security. Europeans in general have been unmoved by those desires. Reactions to Trump’s speech yesterday seemed to depend on nationality and profession, wrote Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent who reported from Davos: European leaders sat stunned as Mr. Trump insulted their governments and questioned their reliability as allies. Others grimaced as Mr. Trump claimed the European nations and Canada owed the United States a debt. Some even scrambled after the speech to find and question current and former U.S. officials about the president’s thinking and the future of the United States as a trustworthy partner. As my colleague Evan Gorelick said, “It’s a confusing time to be a European leader.” The head of the Danish Parliament’s defense committee reflected that view. “I’m glad he’s ruling out military force,” he said. “He insists he wants Greenland, but that’s not new. Of course, we still insist that we are not handing over Greenland.” But corporate executives in the audience had a very different reaction, Zolan found. At a reception after the speech for financial titans who in past years have been at the center of the conversation in Davos, Trump received a warm welcome. “We got great reviews,” Trump told them. “I can’t believe it, but we got good reviews of that speech. Usually they say he’s a horrible dictator-type person, but sometimes you need a dictator.” Soon after, when Trump backed down from tariff threats, stocks surged. More from Davos At the “Board of Peace” event, representatives from countries including Argentina, Kosovo, Saudia Arabia and Turkey signed the charter. Israel, which said it would join, was notably absent from the signing ceremony. The Board of Peace is intended to find a governing solution to Gaza, which has been contentious to Israeli officials. Volodymyr Zelensky is set to meet with Trump to discuss the war in Ukraine. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and a vocal critic of Trump, was barred from entering the U.S. pavilion at Davos and his speaking event was canceled, his spokesman said. Newsom blamed Trump. Trump’s abandonment of global economic leadership as expressed in his Davos speech leaves an opening for China. More on Greenland In Nuuk, Greenland. Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Some Greenlanders and Danes were relieved by the news of the framework deal. “It looks more promising than anything I have seen in weeks,” a researcher said. Trump’s speech at Davos distorted Greenland’s history, attacked NATO and repeated familiar falsehoods about the economy. Here’s a fact check. Greenland is all anyone wants to talk about at Davos — in line, in the corridors and at the bar. My colleague Katrin Bennhold, host of The World, said that in a bathroom, she overheard French diplomats who were touching up their makeup listing ways Europeans could retaliate. Sign up for the World newsletter. Your daily guide to understanding what’s happening — and why it matters. Hosted by Katrin Bennhold, for readers around the world. Get it in your inbox Ask The Morning: Do you have questions about Trump’s plans for Greenland? Let us know here; we may include your response in a coming newsletter. THE LATEST NEWS ICE Agents A Cuban immigrant died this month at an ICE detention center in El Paso. Federal officials called his death a suicide, but the county medical examiner has said it was a homicide. ICE has begun a new operation in Maine, with a focus on immigrants from Somalia. Renee Good, the woman who was killed by an agent in Minnesota, was shot at least three times, according to a preliminary autopsy. Politics The New York Times The Supreme Court seems inclined to block Trump’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve board. The House Oversight Committee voted to recommend holding Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt for refusing to testify in its Epstein investigation. They could face criminal charges. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a rally in Pennsylvania that he was not running for president. International An Iranian official said the government had successfully quashed antigovernment protests. In Australia, three people died in a shooting on a national day of mourning for victims of last month’s Hanukkah attacks. A journalist in the Philippines was sentenced to more than a decade in prison in a case seen as an attack on press freedom. Other Big Stories A former school police officer in Uvalde, Texas, was acquitted of charges of endangering children during the 2022 school shooting. It’s going to be really, really cold across much of the U.S. through the weekend. There’s also a strong chance of snow — though it is not clear where it might fall. The U.S. homicide rate last year is likely to be the lowest in 125 years, according to an analysis of crime data. Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot, Grok, created and shared at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women in just nine days, a Times analysis shows. STATE OF THE COUNTRY Based on a New York Times/Siena poll of 1,625 registered voters nationwide conducted Jan. 12 to 17. Martín González Gómez/The New York Times The country is divided, but that’s no surprise. Americans are split in their views of how Trump is performing as president, a Times/Siena University poll found. But all of this division may be taking a toll. Few Americans think Trump’s second term has made the country better — and nearly half think it’s worse, the poll also found. While many Republicans still support the president, a majority of voters said that Trump had focused on the wrong priorities and that they disapproved of his handling of top issues. See more from the poll. OPINIONS Six American families shared the hardships they face as their health care costs rise significantly, Tracie McMillan writes. Here’s a column from Bret Stephens on Davos and the future of the world order. Introducing Crossplay Go word to word in our first 2-player game. Spell. Score. Outsmart your opponent. Download app MORNING READS At Yosemite National Park. Angus Morton for The New York Times Unsupervised access: Staffing cuts at Yosemite have depleted the number of rangers available to oversee it — and visitors have gone wild. Penmanship: New Jersey will require that all third, fourth and fifth graders learn cursive. Roughly two dozen other states have made similar rules in recent years. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was an Opinion essay about how Europe could respond to Trump’s tariff threat. TODAY’S NUMBER 98 — That how many Academy Awards there will have been after this year’s ceremony. The nominations will be released this morning. SPORTS M.L.B.: Cody Bellinger is returning to the New York Yankees after the team agreed to a five-year, $162.5 million contract. N.F.L.: Terry Pegula, the owner of the Buffalo Bills, said he decided to fire their head coach, Sean McDermott, after the quarterback Josh Allen looked so forlorn over the team’s playoff loss. RECIPE OF THE DAY Ryan Liebe for The New York Times One of the great weeknight dinners: a simple roast chicken, served with your favorite rendition of a green salad. Maybe a warmed baguette on the side? The preparation is a breeze: Rub the chicken with olive oil, season it, then put it in a skillet you’ve heated through in a hot oven. Roast for 15 minutes, then turn the heat down and let time do its work. You’ll want to pull it when an instant-read thermometer, inserted into the thickest part of the thigh, reads around 160 degrees. Let it rest before carving, and then get to work. Save the bones for stock! PARALLEL LINES “Between the Clock and the Bed,” 1981. Janice Chung for The New York Times A new exhibition of Jasper Johns at Gagosian in New York revisits a turning point in the career of the painter, who is 95: the “crosshatched” abstractions he painted during the 1970s and ’80s. The works make up a kind of map of Johns’s life, our art critic Jason Farago writes. Jason was left moved by the display: “They reminded me (I forget, sometimes) of the clarity art still offers — even when it’s abstract; maybe especially when it’s abstract — about why our brief lives matter.” More on culture “Marty Supreme” is one of the great Jewish movies, the film critic Esther Zuckerman writes, “an unapologetic depiction of the Jewish American experience in all of its complications.” Here’s her argument. Jimmy Kimmel says that comics have become political because politics is comedy now. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Theodore Tae/The New York Times Prescribe yourself a medicine ball and see how quickly it leads to core strength and stability. Spend that gift card you received over the holidays. In New York City alone, according to the state comptroller, there is around $55 million in unused gift cards floating around. Exfoliate safely and to better effect with help from the skin scrubbers at Wirecutter. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was allowance. 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 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 January 25 Author Members Posted January 25 January 23, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. We finally have a TikTok deal. ByteDance, the app’s Chinese parent company, reached an agreement to create a U.S. version owned by a group of non-Chinese investors. That concludes a six-year legal dispute about influence on social media — and about competition between two superpowers. President Trump continues to criticize Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, who won international acclaim for a recent speech about global “rupture.” Trump rescinded his invitation to Canada to join his “Board of Peace.” And European leaders held an emergency summit in Brussels to discuss Greenland and, more broadly, their fragile relationship with America. They’re set to propose new Arctic security plans. We’ll get to more news below. But I’d like to start today with the weather. It looks frightful. In Boulder, Colo., in 2024. Mark Makela/Getty Images Seeking shelter The first significant storm of the winter season is likely coming to life this morning in the Rockies, bringing with it the potential to produce snow in Colorado and New Mexico before advancing on the plains of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. In some circles, that is all anyone can talk about right now. Humans love a storm, perhaps especially an imminent one. We’re participants in a drama that’s about to begin. And it’s quite a drama. The system could expand significantly on Saturday, my colleague Judson Jones reports, with heavy snow on its northern flank, sleet and freezing rain in the middle, and punishing rain to the south. The combination could continue its march across Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee while snow blankets much of the Midwest. By nightfall, the system could arrive in Georgia and the Carolinas. On Sunday, the storm (probably!) reaches the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, potentially intensifying again to clobber the corridor that runs from Washington, D.C., to Boston, straight through New York City. Use this tool to discover how much snow may fall where you live. Back on the Plains, temperatures will likely be well below normal. And when Monday arrives, that same brutal, potentially record-breaking cold may settle in across the Eastern United States, leaving millions of people in parkas and moon boots well into next week. “It’s not something you see every winter,” one weather expert told Judson, adding that the storm “is likely to affect about half the U.S. population with accumulating ice, sleet or snow.” Forecast from Jan. 23 at 1 a.m. Eastern to Jan. 25 at 7 p.m. Eastern. Source: National Gridded Snowfall Analysis via the National Weather Service. Let it snow What kind of precipitation you end up experiencing, if any, will dictate the degree of damage your community may confront. Freezing rain and sleet conspire to hurt us the most. The freezing rain weighs down trees and power lines until they break. And the sleet piling up on sidewalks and roadways can create thick sheets of ice. People slip and fall. Vehicles spin off highways like tops. “Snow is one thing, but when you start talking about significant accumulation of sleet or freezing rain in particular, that’s the stuff that really causes more damage,” Eric Fisher, chief meteorologist for WBZ-TV in Boston, told Judson. That could be a big problem in places like Texas. There, freezing rain and sleet could combine with snow to create what’s known as “cobblestone ice,” an impermeable base layer that in December 2013 shut down the city of Fort Worth for days. “That transition from rain to sleet to snow can happen over a hundred miles or just one city block,” Judson told me yesterday. “We aren’t just looking at a flat map; we’re looking at a multilayered cake of air temperatures. And if one layer is off by a single degree, the snow icon on your phone can become a fantasy.” But straight snow can be brutal, too. In the heaviest bands of weather, forecasters say, we could end up with a foot or more on the ground. (Stay strong, Boston. Yesterday afternoon, WBZ’s weather team was saying that amount was not out of the question across much of southern New England.) Travel would be severely disrupted. Home lives, too. Among many other considerations, digging out can be hell on a person’s back. The Brooklyn Bridge last month. Adam Gray for The New York Times Riders on the storm Is any of this actually going to happen? Most reporters cover the present. They bear witness and report what happened: “A fire broke out in a three-bedroom home on Route 48 in Imaginary, Iowa, late last night, igniting a blaze that by dawn had engulfed the barn behind it.” Weather reporters do that, too, of course. They stand in the wind and the rain and the snow and take notes. They tell us how bad it was or how the storm petered out. But just as often they report on the future. I asked Judson about that. He’s a meteorologist. How was he feeling, heading into the weekend, having told us what could happen during it? Is a storm like this Christmas morning for him? Or more of a horror movie? Here’s Judson: When it’s just snow, it feels like Christmas morning — snow brings a certain joy and a sense of shared wonder. But when I see ice in the forecast, as I do now, it turns into a horror movie. Ice is crippling; it brings down power lines and trees. It’s dangerous. The stress comes from the fact that weather is a science that people are often surprised to learn we still don’t fully understand. Standing in line before writing this, I overheard two people talking about the storm as if they knew exactly what would happen. Usually, my wife gives me a look that says, “Don’t say a word,” but she wasn’t there. I couldn’t help myself. I jumped in to explain the most likely scenario versus the outliers. I probably deflated their spirits a bit, but that’s the job: managing expectations before nature takes control. Stay safe, everyone. Take care of one another. For more More than 160 million people are in the storm’s path. Calculate how much snow is coming your way. Try to avoid driving. But if you have to, take it slow. Review more tips here. Frozen power grids could create blackouts across the country. Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s new mayor, is facing a test that has affected his predecessors old and young, Republican and Democratic: a snowstorm that threatens to hobble the city. THE LATEST NEWS Politics The House passed a package of bills to fund the government, sidestepping a Democratic effort to halt funding for ICE. Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who indicted President Trump twice, testified before a House committee that Trump had undermined democracy and the rule of law. (Read four takeaways.) The E.P.A. will stop using rabbits, mice, rats and other mammals to test the toxicity of chemicals by 2035, the agency said. The “Mexico City policy” bars recipients of U.S. foreign aid from promoting abortion. The Trump administration says it will expand the prohibitions to include D.E.I. and “gender ideology.” Greenland An American air base in northern Greenland in 1966. Scanpix, via Getty Images America began fixating on Greenland in the 1940s. The hype plateaued during the Cold War before falling by the turn of the century. How does that history bear on the Trump era? Much about Trump’s so-called framework deal about Greenland remains unclear. But officials have revealed some elements, including NATO’s presence in the Arctic and U.S. ownership of pockets of the island. Immigration Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, is seen being detained in a photo released by Columbia Heights Public Schools officials. Columbia Heights Public Schools This week, immigration agents detained a father and his 5-year-old boy, wearing a bunny-ears hat and Spider-Man backpack, near Minneapolis. Images of the boy’s detention have prompted outrage among locals. A man accused in a 2022 heist that nabbed $100 million worth of jewels, gold and luxury watches was deported before his trial could begin. The Justice Department arrested three people it said had interrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minn., to protest a pastor’s apparent work with ICE. Other Big Stories Volodymyr Zelensky gave a blunt speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and said that Europe needed to do more to support Ukraine. It was a scathing critique of close allies. Alex Honnold, the climber who scaled El Capitan without a rope in the Oscar-winning film “Free Solo,” will do the same up a 101-story skyscraper in Taiwan tonight. The climb will be streamed live on Netflix. OPINIONS Europe can no longer count on American protection, so it’s time for European countries to build their own military independence, Rajan Menon writes. America’s preparedness should be overhauled to avoid a housing crisis as natural disasters become more destructive, Senators Tim Sheehy, Republican of Montana, and Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, write. Here’s a column by Michelle Goldberg on why Rep. Jasmine Crockett won't win her Senate race. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year. MORNING READS In Queens, N.Y. Erin Schaff/The New York Times Ephemeral creations: Take a look inside a Queens studio where Buddhas, sneakers and swans are carved with the knowledge that beauty, like ice, is fleeting. Your pick: Yesterday’s most-clicked story in The Morning was about visitors going wild after staff cuts at Yosemite. A pioneer: Barbara Aronstein Black became the first woman to lead an Ivy League law school, serving as dean of Columbia Law from 1986 to 1991. She died at 92. TODAY’S NUMBER 27.5 — That is how many inches of snow would eventually fall on Central Park during a storm that was hitting its midpoint on this day in 2016. It was the most snow to drop on New York City since record keeping began in 1869. SPORTS N.F.L.: The Indianapolis Colts are aware of an F.B.I. investigation into the death of their former owner Jim Irsay. N.B.A.: Referees missed a goaltending call on a potential Philadelphia 76ers game winner. Soccer: The U.S. women’s national team forward Trinity Rodman is staying with the Washington Spirit, signing a contract through 2028. RECIPE OF THE DAY Christopher Simpson for The New York Times Here’s a plan for this weekend: Make like Ray Liotta in “Goodfellas” and stir up some Sunday sauce for pasta. Get it going in the morning: pork shoulder, Italian sausage and meatballs in a thick, fragrant red sauce that can burble away on the stove for hours. When you’re ready to eat, spoon a bunch of the gravy over nicely al dente pasta, nestle the meats onto the platter and then share the bounty with a crowd of family and friends. It’s a lovely antidote to wintry weather. (We have many more recipes for storm cooking here.) ACADEMY AWARDS Michael B. Jordan in “Sinners.” Warner Bros. Pictures, via Associated Press An endangered species dominated the nominations for the Academy Awards yesterday, our Hollywood reporters observed: “highly original, studio-made films with hefty budgets.” “Sinners,” a horror fantasia set in the 1930s and rooted in Black culture, received 16 nominations, more than any other film in the academy’s history. “One Battle After Another,” an anxious romp about authoritarianism and citizen resistance, garnered 13. Nominees for the acting awards include Michael B. Jordan, Kate Hudson, Timothée Chalamet and Teyana Taylor. (Here’s the full list.) Were there snubs and surprises? You bet there were. (Among other things, “Wicked” got smoked.) Here’s how to stream the nominated films this weekend. If the forecast holds, you’ll have plenty of time. More on culture Eleanor Stanford profiles Luke Thompson, the “Bridgerton” star who plays Benedict, the charmingly libertine middle brother. Thompson leads the new season that’s returning this month. A rake’s progress! Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic this month for a series of concerts that our critic Joshua Barone called “rollicking” and “spectacular.” Check his work: There are lovely audio clips embedded in the review. Late night hosts joked about Trump’s deal making. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Marcello Hernández in “American Boy.” Netflix Watch “American Boy,” Marcello Hernández’s new special, on Netflix. Jason Zinoman, our comedy critic, says he “exudes not only leading-man charisma but also a Glen Powell-like hunger for winning the game of showbiz success.” Hit the snooze button if you like, but not if you have an inconsistent sleep schedule. Prepare for this weekend’s weather with help from the gearheads at Wirecutter — they’ve compiled a list of the tools you need to ride out a winter storm. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was augment and mutagen. 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 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 January 26 Author Members Posted January 26 January 24, 2026 Good morning. It’s cold outside. How can the perpetually shivering warm up to winter? María Jesús Contreras Cold comfort By Melissa Kirsch I stayed in an Airbnb recently and encountered the usual dysphoria one feels when occupying strangers’ homes: How can it be so difficult to unlock a front door, where are the lights, should I have taken my shoes off before running to the restroom, and, for me, the most perplexing, why is it so cold in here, and how on earth do I manipulate this weird thermostat? Regulating one’s temperature this time of year is, in much of the Northern Hemisphere, a fundamental challenge. O, to truly understand the sneaky calculus that determines “real feel” — the weather app said 40s, but I didn’t count on the wind! Layers, you tell yourself before leaving the house, but how many can one reasonably layer under a down parka before locomotion becomes impossible? I saw a headline from T Magazine and clicked eagerly, hoping it would solve things: “How to Stay Warm This Winter,” a list of luxurious accessories that promise to make things tolerable now that “we’ve reached the part of winter where it’s just you versus the elements.” I don’t know that I can justify cashmere earmuffs this year, but maybe over-the-knee socks? One solution, I’m told, is to become a tea person (the Brits just call this “a person”). Tea people, like sauna people, understand that warming oneself is not a layering challenge, but a cellular one. You could armor yourself with sealskin mittens and a down coat indistinguishable from a mountaineer’s sleeping bag, or you could mainline hot liquids and alter your temperature from the inside out. Tea people always have a mug going, a thermos at hand for refills. They carry out their all-day-long, all-day-strong warming ritual in the background, without the fanfare of coffee drinkers with their single-serving special orders. If they’re queried about their tea habits, they may, to the tea-ignorant, come off as a tad smug, like people with established yoga practices. Remember the late-2010s craze for “hygge,” the Danish concept of coziness and comfortable well-being? The Scandinavians, the rest of the world realized, might know a thing or two about optimizing for winter. They know from long, dark seasons, but still rank as the happiest people on the planet. Kari Leibowitz, a psychologist who moved north of the Arctic Circle to study how people thrive there during winter, wrote in The Times in 2020 that the secret is a “positive wintertime mind-set.” It’s possible, she found, to cultivate this, even if you’ve always associated the season with dread. A mind-set shift involves changing what you notice, what you remark upon, where you place your focus. Leibowitz advises concentrating on what you like about winter (cooking, cozy indoor reading, the quiet after snowfall) over what you don’t (don’t get me started). “Appoint yourself a wintertime ambassador this year,” she advised, “and encourage everyone around you to notice what they like about the winter as well.” I imagine this self-designation might read as irritating to one’s shivering friends and family who would prefer to partake in the time-honored January tradition of complaining about the weather, but I’m already the unofficial publicist for summer, so maybe a new seasonal enthusiasm would read as refreshing. Horowitz also advises people to get outside, to figure out the layering situation such that experiencing the Norwegian concept of “friluftsliv,” or “open air life,” isn’t excruciating. The Swedish author of “There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather” (I think that sentence usually completes with “only bad clothes”) told Horowitz, “There are some days when it’s harder to get outside than others, but I know that if I do, I’m never going to regret going outside.” Ah! That penetrates, doesn’t it? You’re never going to regret going outside. This is the sort of mantra that works on me. Every fiber of my being may disagree with it, but if I allow my brain to override the resistance, if I believe intellectually that it’s true, I’ll go out in the cold and quite possibly discover the physical and mental benefits of “outdoorphins.” If I can take a break from my usual winter pastimes of turning up the thermostat when no one is looking and making others touch and offer sympathy for my corpse-cold extremities, there’s a different relationship with winter awaiting. You’re never going to regret going outside. No regrets, only possibility. You don’t have to make snow angels or take up cold-water swimming — just get your good clothes on and get out there. IN ONE IMAGE Federal agents deployed pepper spray on a protester in Minneapolis on Wednesday. Vincent Alban/The New York Times On Wednesday, ICE agents patrolling Minneapolis collided with a car piloted by two teenagers. Agents detained the teens, and a crowd quickly formed. A local photographer texted Vincent Alban, a Times photography fellow covering Minneapolis. Alban sped over from a mile away and was taking pictures when ICE pushed one protester to the ground. With three agents on top of the demonstrator, another squirted pepper spray in his face. “The actual paper spray was an extremely fleeting moment, it couldn’t have been a second long,” Vincent recalls. Still, he and his camera were present. “The thing I love about photojournalism is that you have to be there in order to do your job,” he said. “It’s a firsthand account: What I’m seeing is what I’m photographing. With that I hope it’s seen as truthful.” More on immigration Wide-scale protests against ICE shut down parts of Minneapolis-St. Paul yesterday. Thousands of demonstrators marched, hundreds of businesses closer their doors, and scores of workers and students stayed home. An F.B.I. agent who tried to investigate the ICE officer who shot Renee Good has resigned, after leadership pressured her to drop the inquiry. A majority of Americans, including 7 in 10 independents, believe ICE’s tactics have gone too far, a Times/Siena University poll found. THE LATEST NEWS Winter Storm Colorado Springs on Friday. Christian Murdock/The Gazette, via Associated Press The biggest storm of the winter is making its way across the U.S., with Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas in its path today. Cities are scrambling to stockpile road salt, airlines are canceling flights and some schools have pre-emptively canceled classes for early next week. Here are maps to track the frigid temperatures and expected snowfall. The storm poses a threat to energy grids, as heavy snow and freezing rain risk bringing down branches and power lines. Politics The U.S. military struck a boat in the Pacific that it claimed was smuggling drugs, killing two people. It was the first known strike since the capture of Nicolás Maduro. In a break with decades of science, the head of the federal panel that recommends vaccines for Americans said shots against polio and measles should be optional. International Ukrainian, Russian and American negotiators met in Abu Dhabi for the first trilateral peace talks since the start of the war in Ukraine. Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, made a surprise visit to Greenland, seeking to ease fears over President Trump’s efforts to take over the island. Other Big Stories Ryan Wedding, a Canadian Olympic snowboarder who was on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list, was arrested in Mexico. He is charged with running a drug-trafficking ring and ordering the murder of a witness. The police have arrested five people in connection with the shootings of a judge and his wife in Lafayette, Ind., one of whom had a long-running trial in the judge’s court. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film The New York Times Academy Award nominations were announced this week. In the video above, Kyle Buchanan, our awards season columnist, breaks down the surprises and snubs. Click to watch. The documentaries that earned Oscar nods feature people standing up against oppressive systems; the patriarchy of Iran, the prisons of Alabama, the propaganda of Vladimir Putin. Here’s a guide. “The Secret Agent,” a political thriller from Brazil, earned four Oscar nominations. Its breakout star? Tânia Maria, a 79-year-old actress who has a modest role as a cigarette-puffing housemother. TV “Heated Rivalry,” a steamy romance about hockey players in love, has spawned a fan base so passionate that one late-night host compared it to Beatlemania. A new HBO documentary, “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!,” is a loving portrait of a comedy giant. Here are takeaways. More Culture Vanessa Horabuena with her painting “The One Who Lost Its Way.” Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times Trump’s favorite artist: Vanessa Horabuena, a “speed painter” who thrills crowds with her rapid, theatrical compositions of Christian and political imagery. The Trump administration’s travel restrictions have disrupted plans for musicians, theater groups and other artists trying to tour the U.S. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year. CULTURE CALENDAR By Tom Wright-Piersanti ?️?♂️? “The Lord of the Rings” (in theaters): The first film in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy came out 25 years ago, and the series has briefly returned to theaters to mark the occasion. Last weekend I took my son, a second grader, to see the first installment, “The Fellowship of the Ring.” He was captivated, thrilled, a little frightened. I was, too, even though I had watched it on DVD so many times I’d lost count. These are movies made to be seen on a big screen, though, if you’re snowed in, they’re pretty great on a small screen, too. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Ryan Liebe for The New York Times By Melissa Clark Farro and Bean Chili If this weekend’s winter storm is keeping you close to the warmth of your kitchen, consider simmering a pot of Ali Slagle’s five-star farro and bean chili. Nontraditional but extremely satisfying, the farro in this vegan recipe has a nubby texture that recalls ground meat, and its starchiness helps thicken the mix. And if you like your chili on the fiery side, add a couple of minced chipotle chiles in adobo sauce or double the chili power. That’ll be sure to warm you right up. REAL ESTATE Katie and Nick Deponte with their son, Graham. Philip Cheung for The New York Times The Hunt: A couple wanted to raise their son near family in Southern California. Which house did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $600,000 in Scotland: A six-bedroom house overlooking the sea; a converted 18th century church; a restored seven-bedroom house next to an abbey. Bridging the gap: A family in India found the perfect site for their dream farmstead, but the land was split by a deep gorge. Their solution? A house that doubles as a bridge. TRAVEL Trends of 2026: Our writers predict what’s next in the world of travel, including face scans, microvacations and the healing effects of sound. Snow and ice: This weekend’s winter storm is likely to disrupt travel plans. If you have a flight booked, here’s what you need to know. Tripped up: A semi truck clipped their rental car in Australia. Two years later, they still hadn’t gotten their deposit back. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter The best chef’s knife A great chef’s knife can revolutionize daily meal prep. When you’re ready for an upgrade, start by thinking about your cutting style: Do you prefer to rock along the blade as you cut? Then German knives, which have a more pronounced curve, are best. However, if you tend to make individual slices — meaning the blade leaves the board after each cut — then the flatter belly curve of a Japanese knife is best. We’ve chopped over 70 pounds of produce to find the best chef’s knives in both styles. And once you’ve invested in a great one, a bit of care and maintenance, like hand-washing and regular sharpening, can keep it in good shape for decades. — Lesley Stockton GAME OF THE WEEK DeMarcus Lawrence, center, of the Seattle Seahawks. Ezra Shaw/Getty Images Los Angeles Rams vs. Seattle Seahawks, N.F.C. Championship: The last two teams standing in the N.F.C. are well acquainted. In November, the Rams knocked off the Seahawks, 21-19. A month later the Seahawks won the rematch, topping the Rams 38-37 in an overtime thriller. Now, Part 3. The Seahawks are coming in hot. Last week they crushed the 49ers, 41-6, in a game that served as a showcase for their stellar defense — the “Dark Side,” as they call it. In fact, in the past couple of months, only one team has really been able to crack the Seattle defense: the Rams, with their M.V.P. front-runner quarterback Matthew Stafford. This game, The Athletic’s Michael-Shawn Dugar writes, “will be the Dark Side’s toughest test of the season.” Sunday at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on Fox NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was blocked. 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 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 January 26 Author Members Posted January 26 January 25, 2026 Good morning. Yesterday, federal agents shot and killed a man in Minnesota, setting off another day of intense protests and prompting more calls from officials to end ICE’s operations in the state. We have the latest on that story below. Then, we have an introduction to a game from The Times, along with a tool to help you do better at it. Federal agents confronting protesters in Minneapolis yesterday. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times Another shooting Border Patrol agents shot and killed a 37-year-old man in Minneapolis yesterday. The victim, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was an intensive care nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital. He was a U.S. citizen, the Minneapolis police chief said. Federal officials sought to portray Pretti as a domestic terrorist, saying he had approached agents with a “semi-automatic handgun” and the intent to “massacre” them. But videos analyzed by The Times appear to contradict their account. They show Pretti holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when agents take him to the ground and strike him. One agent appears to remove a gun from near Pretti’s right hip. At the same time, another agent unholsters his firearm and points it at Pretti’s back. Federal officials released images of a handgun they said Pretti was carrying. The Minneapolis police chief said he had a valid firearms permit. Open carry is legal with a permit in Minnesota. In a news conference, Mayor Jacob Frey accused the Trump administration of terrorizing his city. “How many more residents, how many more Americans, need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” he asked. Witnesses to the shooting provided sworn court filings that raised questions about the government’s description of what happened. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Democrats would not support a government spending package if it included funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Colleagues and acquaintances of Pretti’s were stunned by his death. They described him as a friendly neighbor and hardworking professional who was devoted to his patients. This is at least the third shooting involving federal law enforcement agents in the city this month, including the killing of Renee Good on Jan. 7. A Times reporter describes what he saw while reporting on the ICE surge in Minneapolis, as “a dark, dystopian future becoming reality.” Eden Weingart/The New York Times Brain trainer By Jodi Rudoren I am positively average at Scrabble. While I’m good with words, I don’t know the tricks. I haven’t memorized the two-letter combos that are never used in conversation. I can’t tell when I should try to make a little grid of short words versus a longer but lower-scoring word that opens up the board. I’m clueless about defense. Now comes Cross Bot, a companion to The New York Times’s game Crossplay. It’s the coach I didn’t realize I was yearning for, providing a succinct postgame rundown of what you did right and what you missed. Crossplay, released in the United States on Wednesday, is The Times’s first foray into two-player games. It’s a cousin of Scrabble and Words With Friends, with tweaks to the board, the dictionary and the rules. Plus, the miracle that is Cross Bot. The bot tells you how you — and your opponent — rated on a scale of 1 to 99 in strategy and luck, and who was more in control of the game at each turn. It walks you through four key moves in each game. Throughout, it’s encouraging: Though you didn’t win, you made strong moves. The best moves, like MAZIER and OOZE, played a higher-scoring Z. MOXIE was a better move. It scores the same points this turn, but helps you score more next turn. Darn, I love the word “moxie” — how did I miss that one? The humans behind the bot The New York Times A trio of Times journalists who are also computer programmers — Tom Giratikanon, Eve Washington and Asmaa Elkeurti — worked with the Games team to build Cross Bot over the past 14 months. Along the way, Eve had to teach herself a new computer language, Go, which sped up the bot 300-fold. Powered by 40 million simulated games and 20,000 lines of code, the tool analyzes 15 million possible moves for each game in three seconds. (It was made by humans, with no help from generative A.I.) After playing a couple dozen games — against my husband, my teenage daughter and strangers named Lynda, Slowige and Uncle Eli — I sat down with Tom to learn more. Jodi: How do you start on a project like this? Tom: There’s a lot of academic research about games like this. What we can do well is apply the theoretical research to your specific game as a player. It’s a lot of math, a lot of data. We can’t even actually look at every single possibility. But based on the letters you have, it is pretty good at saying what words you can form this turn, what words you can form next turn. Are you left with good letters or not, and what’s left in the bag. I’m fascinated by the 1-99 rubrics on strategy versus luck. If I lose and see that my luck score was way lower than my opponent’s, I feel better. Eve developed formulas to calculate luck. If you’re consistently drawing really tough letters, it’ll know. Same if you consistently get good tiles — all the blanks, all the S’s. For the strategy score, we use “chance to win.” Let’s say it’s early on and there’s a range of good moves. The worst gives you a 40 percent chance, the best, 60 percent. If you pick the 60 percent move, you get a strategy score of 99. Humans are actually pretty good at this game. There’s hundreds of possible moves every turn, and most people find a solid one. (The average strategy rating by Friday was 53.) Movin’ on up About one million people downloaded Crossplay in the 48 hours after its U.S. release. Tom analyzed an early sample of completed games, and found that the top 5 percent ended at 400 points or more. That made me feel pretty good. My own average score so far is 312, my highest 444. Friday afternoon, I beat Lynda on the final turn. Bravo! said the bot. Way to turn it around and win. My best move was SHIRAZ, for 115 points. (I should pour myself a glass!) It had a triple-letter on the Z, a triple-word, and a side word of SICS. My average move scores 24, up from 22 when I started. Thank you, Cross Bot. Sign up for the Gameplay newsletter. Each week, our puzzle editors share brain teasers, puzzles and Gameplay stories they love. Get it in your inbox THE LATEST NEWS Winter Storm In Memphis yesterday. Brad J. Vest for The New York Times Snow, sleet and blistering cold swept across a giant part of the U.S. yesterday, causing extensive power outages, particularly in the South. Forecasters are watching for ice accumulation, which could lead to more power outages. The storm was making its way into the Northeast this morning and could dump more than a foot of snow in some areas. Transit authorities in many cities asked passengers to avoid travel and expect longer wait times for trains and buses. Nashville debuted a snowplow to tackle the drifts. It’s called “Dolly Plowton.” International Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s leader, has chosen quiet resolve over flattery when dealing with President Trump. The strategy seems to be working. A Times analysis shows how Iran’s security forces used lethal force to crush recent protests across the country. Myanmar held its third and final stage of voting today, in an election widely seen as a sham. Other Big Stories In New York, more than 1,000 demonstrators rallied to protest ICE after the latest shooting in Minneapolis. An anti-ICE protest also occurred in Washington, D.C. A group of fringe researchers used genetic data from more than 20,000 U.S. children to argue that white people are intellectually superior. THE SUNDAY DEBATE The internet obsessed over a rift in the Beckham family after Brooklyn Beckham, the eldest son of David and Victoria Beckham, criticized his parents in a series of Instagram posts. Who do you think was in the right? Brooklyn. “He sounds like a young man who’s just had enough, who wants to get on with his life, his new marriage and who wants to make his own decisions without his parents’ interference,” Carole Malone writes for Express.co.uk. David and Victoria. “His act of independence was to attack the two people who gave him limitless opportunities, which he used to become a part-time model, second-rate photographer and failed soccer player,” Aaron Patrick writes in The Nightly of Australia. FROM OPINION The post-World War II order has helped foster global cooperation. The U.S. should rebuild its alliances to tackle the challenges of this century, writes John Kerry, the former secretary of state. Here is a column by M. Gessen on state terror. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year. MORNING READS Alex Honnold climbing the Taipei 101 Skyscraper in Taiwan. Ann Wang/Reuters “King Kong in the city”: Skyscraper climbers describe what it’s like to scale a building. White House makeover: Take a look at 10 areas Trump has transformed in the “People’s House.” Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about a young family’s search for a home in Southern California. SPORTS Women’s soccer: Trinity Rodman scored a goal in her first game as captain of the U.S. women’s national team. The U.S. defeated Paraguay 6-0. N.B.A.: Luka Doncic led the Los Angeles Lakers to a 116-110 win over his former team, the Dallas Mavericks, in Dallas. BOOK OF THE WEEK By Elisabeth Egan “Half His Age,” by Jennette McCurdy: A novel about a 17-year-old’s sexual relationship with her middle-aged creative writing teacher will not be everyone’s cup of tea. But Jennette McCurdy’s assured, provocative follow-up to her 2022 best-selling, equally provocative memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” cements her standing as a talented writer. Here McCurdy, a former child actor who starred in Nickelodeon shows like “iCarly” and “Sam & Cat,” whisks us to Hollywood’s polar opposite: an unglamorous corner of Anchorage, where her protagonist, Waldo, subsists on microwave dinners, a Victoria’s Secret paycheck and cursory attention from her mother (in that order). Enter Mr. Korgy — married father, bloviator on film and literature with a capital L — whom Waldo fixates on as an antidote to her own disaffection and loneliness. Moral and criminal issues aside (a heavy lift, admittedly), McCurdy’s articulates the vulnerability of girlhood with guts, humor and just the slightest whisper of warmth. THE INTERVIEW Chloé Zhao Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By David Marchese This week’s subject for The Interview is the director Chloé Zhao, whose film “Hamnet,” an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel about the death of Shakespeare’s titular young son, was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. In Shakespeare’s time, the period in which “Hamnet” is set, the death of a child was a more common occurrence than it is now. I assume that as a result people had a different perspective on what it meant to lose a child. I’m curious if you think it’s possible to recreate older emotional perspectives. I think about that all the time. Maggie O’Farrell said that she doesn’t believe it’s possible that the grief is any less, and I tend to agree, because even though things are so different, our biology hasn’t changed. The desire that we have to protect a child will not change. However, the stories we attach to that pain might be different. You know, I recently trained to be a death doula. Really? I just finished Level 1 training in the U.K. In one of the training sessions, we had to research Indigenous cultures from around the world, how they deal with death and dying both today and in the past. You can see that the grief of losing a loved one doesn’t change. However, the societal understanding of death and the space it gives to grief and how it’s embedded in the culture and the medicalization of death have shifted so much. In the modern world, when death is no longer seen as a natural part of life — because now it’s about staying alive as long as we can — there’s almost shame around death. I want to rip up all my questions and ask more about you wanting to be a death doula! Why are you interested in becoming one? Because I have been terrified of death my whole life. I still am. And because I’ve been so afraid I haven’t been able to live fully. I haven’t been able to love with my heart open because I’m so scared of losing love, which is a form of death. And because I’m so scared of it, I have no choice but to start to develop a healthier relationship with it, or the second half of life would be too hard. It shouldn’t be this terrifying that I can’t even live. Read more of the interview here. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Illustration by Rob Farmer Read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Stay safe in the frigid cold. Experts offer their advice. Transport your mind with some historical fiction featuring rebellious characters. Fix your own stuff. A simple set of tools can go a long way. MEAL PLAN Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. A few weeks into the new year, are you sticking with your healthy eating resolutions? Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter has recipes to help you out, starting with Andy Baraghani’s sticky miso salmon bowl, a favorite of Times editors and readers alike. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was fettuccine. Can you put eight historical events — including the debut of MTV, one of the first roller skates and some of the first known cave art — 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 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 January 27 Author Members Posted January 27 January 26, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. A winter storm wreaked havoc from Mississippi to Maine yesterday as the country grappled with the second fatal shooting by federal agents of a protester in Minneapolis. The victim’s name was Alex Pretti, and he was 37. I’m going to start there. Then we’ll turn to the storm. Federal agents confronting protesters in Minneapolis on Saturday. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times A showdown State and federal authorities faced off in Minnesota yesterday, after Border Patrol agents killed a U.S. citizen on Saturday. The state wants to investigate the shooting, in which officials tackled Pretti, a registered nurse from the city’s Veterans Affairs hospital who had been filming them on his phone. Then they stripped him of a handgun, for which he had a permit, and shot him again and again. The federal government does not want that inquiry to happen. Agents have refused to give state investigators access to the crime scene, even though they had a search warrant. Late on Saturday night, a judge barred federal officials from destroying evidence in the case. Then, yesterday, the Trump administration pushed groundless accusations against the victim. Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of President Trump’s Border Patrol operations, told CNN that Pretti wanted to “perpetrate violence, obstruct, delay or obfuscate Border Patrol in the performance of their duties in an active crime scene.” The agents were the victims, he said. Videos analyzed by The Times contradict those claims. See the moments before Pretti’s death: Still images from witness videos show a timeline of Pretti’s shooting. The New York Times Brian O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, said on CBS that Pretti appeared to be “exercising his First Amendment rights to record law enforcement activity, and also exercising his Second Amendment rights to lawfully be armed in a public space in the city.” He described the city and his department as being at a breaking point. “People have had enough,” he said. No respite Residents of Minneapolis, tens of thousands of whom have been protesting in the streets this month, are grieving together and experiencing “a profound sense of solidarity,” said Ernesto Londoño, a Minneapolis-based Times reporter with whom I spoke yesterday. With Minnesota officials powerless to push ICE out of the city, he said, “ordinary people are looking out for one another in every conceivable way.” Ernesto noted a strand of communal grief. “Minnesota is a state that has a lot of trauma from 2020 and its aftermath,” he told me, referring to the killing of George Floyd and the violent protests that followed it. Last June, two state legislators were shot, as were their spouses. One of the legislators died, as did her husband. In August, a mass shooting at a Catholic church in Minneapolis left two children dead. Federal agents killed Renee Good on Jan. 7. And then Pretti on Saturday. Protesters marching in Minneapolis on Sunday. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times The bond formed by residents was evident yesterday. It was cold in Minneapolis this past weekend, dangerously so, with lows in the negative teens. It’s painful to be outside for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Ernesto said he’d seen protesters handing out hand warmers and bundling up to cover as much of their skin as possible. Some lit fires for warmth. Local residents have opened their doors to others, giving them a respite from the punishing chill. Yesterday afternoon, members of the Minnesota National Guard, clad in yellow vests to differentiate them from federal agents, brought protesters coffee, hot chocolate and doughnuts. But that sense of fellowship comes at a cost. “We think of Minnesota as generally peaceful, filled with civic-minded and nice people,” Ernesto said. “But they have been put through the wringer. This has been hard on them personally.” The whole situation in Minneapolis, he said, “feels unsustainable.” More on Minneapolis The Trump administration rushed to demonize Pretti and distort the facts of its violent crackdown. That has become a pattern. Trump said Democrats were to blame for the deaths of Good and Pretti. Republicans are split on how to respond to Pretti’s killing, and many party leaders have stayed silent. Pro-Trump influencers spread false information about Pretti’s killing on social media, including some images generated by artificial intelligence. Pretti’s friends and family denounced the “sickening lies” spreading about him online. Major companies based in Minnesota — including Target, Best Buy and General Mills — issued a public letter calling for an “immediate de-escalation of tensions” in the state. STORM FRONT The New York Times A massive winter storm has dumped snow across 17 states, and more than 85 million people are under an extreme-cold warning today. Record-breaking temperatures are expected to last for much of the week. Hundreds of thousands of people remain without power, and experts say more outages could come. You can follow updates here. Transit: Count yourself lucky if you don’t have to leave the house. Major transit systems have suspended some services and nearly 40 percent of all flights scheduled to depart in the U.S. were canceled yesterday. Cancellations continue this morning. Clearing roads: Zohran Mamdani, New York’s new mayor, passed a major test. The city said every road was plowed at least twice by last night. Ski jumps in Manhattan: We loved this compilation of things New Yorkers did in public, and the video of Shaun White, the Olympic snowboarder, doing flips in Central Park. THE LATEST NEWS International Xi Jinping with his military leadership in 2024. Li Gang/Xinhua, via Getty Images A Chinese general once considered a top deputy to Xi Jinping is under investigation. It’s an example of how even those closest to Xi can fall. A ferry in the Philippines carrying at least 350 people sank early this morning. At least 18 people have died. In Mexico, gunmen opened fire on a soccer field after a match yesterday, killing 11 people. A water balloon fight in Venezuela led to the arrest of 25 men on charges of treason. Europe replaced Russian natural gas for American. Experts say that could give Trump more leverage. Politics This year’s tax filing season opens today. The first C.E.O. of the I.R.S. says the agency is prepared. At the Sundance Film Festival, Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, Democrat of Florida, was hit in the face by a man who said the lawmaker would be deported. The 26-year-old strategist who ran Mamdani’s successful campaign for New York mayor is in demand for this year’s midterm elections. Other Big Stories At a Goodwill store in New York City. DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times Goodwill announced record sales last year, a sign that consumers were concerned about the economy and that young people see secondhand clothes as more sustainable and fashionable. Most American believe that a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach, a New York Times/Siena poll found. Columbia University has chosen a new president. The school has been without a permanent leader since 2024, when pro-Palestinian demonstrations rocked its campus. OPINIONS A.I. will be disruptive, but it can’t make thoughtful decisions — only humans can do that, Blair Effron argues. “Harry Potter” books reflect the values of liberalism that millennials grew up with. That worldview is no longer attractive to young people, writes Louise Perry. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year. MORNING READS In a fjord near Nuuk, Greenland. Leon Neal/Getty Images Adventure tourism: Greenland has become a popular destination in recent years. Now Trump’s interest is causing some potential travelers to ask if it’s safe. It takes a village: Apps are helping people find platonic co-parents to balance the demands of raising a child. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about Trump’s renovations to the White House. Metropolitan Diary: Who invited you? TODAY’S NUMBER 2.2 million — That is how many pounds of rice one Mississippi farmer is drying on his farm right now. He says he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s serious. Rice is one of the state’s biggest crops, and almost no one is buying. SPORTS A.F.C.: The New England Patriots advanced to their 12th Super Bowl after beating the Denver Broncos 10-7 in a snowy A.F.C. championship game. N.F.C.: The Seattle Seahawks defeated the Los Angeles Rams 31-27 in the N.F.C. championship game and will play the Patriots in Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8. Cycling: Halfway through the final day of the Tour Down Under, two kangaroos jumped into the peloton and caused multiple riders to crash. RECIPE OF THE DAY Romulo Yanes for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Vivian Lui. The secret to making Edna Lewis’s recipe for ethereal, flannel-soft biscuits is to use a homemade baking soda — two parts cream of tartar sifted with one part baking soda — so there’s no chance of a metallic aftertaste in the dough. She calls for lard, too, which is excellent if you can find the creamy white variety usually labeled “leaf lard,” but if you have only butter, so be it. They’ll still be among the best biscuits you’ve ever had. A MOST DANGEROUS PAINTER Jacques-Louis David’s self-portrait. via GrandPalaisRmn, Musée du Louvre Our art critic, Jason Farago, is in love with a terrorist. Here, he looks closely at a self-portrait of him: Jacques-Louis David, painted in 1794 while David was in prison for his murderous support of the French Revolution. Jason’s close read of the work is immersive and bold, a new form of criticism, and my words can’t do it justice. The best way to experience it — to learn the painting and its pain — is to click here. More on culture Patrick Dempsey has spent years dismantling his McDreamy persona from “Grey’s Anatomy.” He now stars as an assassin in a new Fox thriller, “Memory of a Killer.” “In conversation, he is eager, earnest, innately charming,” writes Alexis Soloski, who went to Toronto to profile him, “but also discontented by the mismatch between how the world sees him and how he sees himself — as a serious person who is rarely taken seriously.” The culture war in Hollywood has gone camp, Casey Michael Henry writes. “In many cases, it is hard to tell whether the left-wing talking point issuing from the character onscreen is actually the product of an irony-poisoned right-wing writer — or, inversely, whether right-wing dialogue comes from a meanspirited member of the Democratic Socialists of America.” Watch “Landman” and you’ll catch the drift. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Illustration by Christina Hong. Scale your recipes up or down with this helpful new tool and tips from New York Times Cooking. Try these four simple tests to find out how well you are aging. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were apricot, capacitor and patriotic. 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 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 February 1 Author Members Posted February 1 January 30, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. I hope you’re staying warm. President Trump is expected to announce that Kevin Warsh, a former Fed official, will replace Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve. Senate Democrats, Republicans and the White House reached a deal to avoid a partial government shutdown last night. And Trump is weighing new options for military action in Iran. We have more news below. I’m going to start today, though, with an oral history of what’s been happening at the F.B.I. Kash Patel Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images A new F.B.I. When President Trump returned to office last year, he declared the Federal Bureau of Investigation a “corrupt” and partisan agency and vowed to clean house. Perhaps that was no surprise. The bureau had investigated him several times. To run the show, Trump appointed Kash Patel, a former public defender and intelligence official who had never worked for the agency, though he had spun conspiracy theories about it. Patel immediately began to transform the F.B.I. by undoing its nonpartisan rules and norms, alarming many of its 38,000 employees. He fired people who had worked on the Trump investigations. He assigned 20 percent of the agency’s staff to immigration enforcement, meaning that there are now fewer agents and analysts to stop terrorism, drug trafficking, white-collar crime, public corruption and cybercrime. One thing that hasn’t changed: Employees still can’t speak to the press without permission. But 45 people who work at the bureau or who left last year talked to my colleagues Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser anyway — a sign, they say, of how unnerved many people there are. This new F.B.I., many current and former employees of the agency told them, has made the United States less safe. Before I share some of what they heard, though, I’ll tell you what a spokesman for the F.B.I. said in response to their reporting: This story is a regurgitation of fake narratives, conjecture and speculation from anonymous sources who are disconnected from reality. They can whine and peddle falsehoods all they want — but it won’t change the facts that the F.B.I. under this administration worked with partners at every level and delivered a historic 2025. So, noted. Immigration enforcement Last winter, Patel directed the bureau to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement in its raids and arrests. (The F.B.I. has no authority to enforce immigration laws. That is not the agency’s job.) Jill Fields, who worked on violent crimes in the Los Angeles field office, said she was alarmed to see federal agencies, including the F.B.I., arrest protesters who weren’t impeding immigration enforcement: Yes, they’re yelling, they’re taunting, but that’s their right. This is what I was worried about and why I pushed back when the L.A. office was asked to investigate protesters last year. It was unthinkable to me then, and now it’s happening. If you start arresting or investigating people for exercising their First Amendment rights, then they don’t have those rights. Jet ski diplomacy Emily and Rachel also heard about Patel’s behavior in the field. One senior executive told them about some unusual requests Patel had in advance of a secret conference of the Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance formed after World War II between the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Before the conference, his staff says he’s unhappy because he doesn’t like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. He wants Premier soccer games. He wants to go jet skiing. He’d like a helicopter tour. Everyone who heard about this was like: Hold on. Is he really going to ask the MI5 director to go jet skiing instead of meeting? The schedule is set, and every Five Eyes partner is doing this. They can’t just say that he’s not participating and instead he wants to go to a Premier soccer game. This is a job, guys. Bookkeeping Patel has promoted arrest statistics that agents and analysts say are misleading. This month, Patel claimed on social media that he had overseen a “100% increase” in arrests in his first year and a “210% increase” in the disruption of gangs and other criminal enterprises. Here’s what an F.B.I. field-office leader told Emily and Rachel about that: When you make F.B.I. agents street cops, you get street-cop numbers. We didn’t used to count immigration arrests, because we didn’t do immigration. Now we do. We didn’t do street patrols in D.C. in the past. Now we do. In the past, we mostly worked the complex investigations the F.B.I. is famous for. Complicated work with wires and sophisticated techniques — all aimed at taking out the entire criminal enterprises or national security threats. Now, under Kash, we are counting stuff that has been historically left to local police departments and other agencies and saying, Wow, look at us. Camera-ready Dan Bongino Loren Elliott for The New York Times Patel and Dan Bongino, at the time his deputy director, changed the bureau’s fitness test for new agents — replacing, among other things, sit-ups with pull-ups. Why? A senior executive told The Times: Bongino wanted to establish a new physical-fitness test without any evidence-based research. He wanted to have men and women do the exact same pull-ups, which all of the data said would lead to losing a number of female recruits and potentially female agents that hadn’t been tested for pull-ups before. When he was informed of that, Bongino said, You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our history, but if on the Ring door-camera video she’s out of shape or overweight, that’s going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they’d look good on a doorbell camera. He said it’s the way these times are. There’s much, much more. I urge you to read the whole article. THE LATEST NEWS Congress The deal to avoid a shutdown, if it holds, would fund a large portion of the government for the remainder of the fiscal year. It also included a stopgap measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security for two weeks while Democrats continue negotiating guardrails to rein in immigration agents. The chart below shows how ICE was funded last year. Sources: USAspending.gov; U.S. Congress. Ashley Wu/The New York Times Iran The U.S. military has been building up forces near Iran in recent days. See a map showing where. The timing of potential U.S. military action raises questions about Trump’s motives. Weeks ago, when he last threatened to intervene, he said he wanted to defend Iranian protesters. But the protests are over, and Iran poses almost no immediate threat. The European Union will list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran as a terrorist organization. Immigration Minnesota is in a standoff with the federal government over who has the power to investigate the killing of protesters. It’s not a fair fight, Emily Bazelon writes. In Minneapolis, agents are using facial recognition and other tools to identify undocumented immigrants and track protesters, officials said. Protesters have targeted ICE agents’ hotels with “no sleep” protests, making noise outside windows or in the lobby to keep agents awake. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said “improvements could and should be made” in Minneapolis, and suggested he might draw down the operation if local jails cooperate with local officials to allow his immigration agents access to jails in the state. More on Politics Officials said the liquid sprayed on Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, earlier this week was apple cider vinegar and water. The man who sprayed her was charged with assault. Trump’s televised cabinet meetings regularly stretch for hours as officials shower him with praise. Yesterday he debuted a shorter version, saying the previous iterations were “boring.” The U.S. trade deficit has widened despite Trump’s tariffs, which continue to cause huge fluctuations in trade. International Flooding near Maputo, Mozambique, earlier this month. Emidio Jozine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Hundreds of thousands of people across southern Africa have been displaced from their homes after heavy rains caused catastrophic flooding. Venezuelan legislators approved sweeping overhauls of the country’s oil sector, bowing to Trump administration pressure. Trump said that Russia had agreed to a temporary pause in its missile attacks on Kyiv, Ukraine, during a fierce cold spell. Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israeli soldiers died in the Gaza war because the U.S. had held back some weapons deliveries, and he vowed to cut Israel’s reliance on American military aid. Polar bears in Svalbard, an archipelago in Norway, have grown fatter over the past three decades. As global warming has melted more ice, seals have gotten easier to hunt, a study found. Other Big Stories Federal prosecutors accused a man of trying to help Luigi Mangione escape from jail by impersonating an F.B.I. agent. Students are finding new ways to cheat on the SAT. LONGEVITY LOTTERY? Conventional wisdom says that chugging sodas, pounding Big Macs, chain-smoking and binge-drinking will shorten your life. It also says that eating healthy foods, going on runs, lifting weights and getting a good night’s sleep will make you live longer. Maybe not, according to a new study that says your life span is largely written in your genes. If your genetic potential is to live to be 80, for instance, then it’s unlikely that anything you do will make you reach 100. To see how much genes contribute to life spans, the researchers used data from studies of twins. Their conclusion: Genes predominate, especially for people who live to be very old. Read more about their research and what it may mean for you. (Just remember: Healthy habits can still improve your quality of life!) OPINIONS David Brooks is leaving The Times after more than 20 years. Here’s an excerpt from his final column: We could use better political leadership, of course, but the crucial question facing America is: How can we reverse this pervasive loss of faith in one another, in our future and in our shared ideals? I do not believe that most people can flourish in a meaningless, nihilistic universe. Students are using artificial intelligence to avoid becoming adults. One possible solution is a shift back to a more oral culture, writes Clay Shirky, a vice provost at New York University. Introducing Crossplay Go word to word in our first 2-player game. Spell. Score. Outsmart your opponent. Download app MORNING READS In Haines, Alaska. Colin Arisman for The New York Times A taste of home: After a typhoon destroyed their villages, Alaska Natives lost access to the wild food that makes up most of their diet. Neighbors in the state stepped up, donating dried seal, fish heads, walrus flippers, bowhead whale blubber, frozen salmon and quarts of inky blueberries. Making department stores great again: Saks Fifth Avenue’s bankruptcy filing has revived questions about the purpose and future of luxury shopping emporiums. Ginia Bellafante, who covers the culture of recreational acquisition, found some answers. Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was a video about how federal agents used battlefield technology for an immigration arrest at a home in Minneapolis. TODAY’S NUMBER 53.4 — That is the percentage of A’s awarded to Harvard undergraduates during the fall semester. The school issued a report in October proposing the introduction of an A+ grade as a way to recognize the best work among so many regular-shmegular A’s. SPORTS N.B.A.: The league will meet with the Cleveland Cavaliers to discuss changes to their unusual “raised” court after the Los Angeles Lakers star Luka Dončić narrowly avoided serious injury this week. The Cavs have the only raised court in the N.B.A., with a gap between the floor and an ice rink below. Olympics: The U.S. Olympic sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was arrested and charged with dangerous excessive speeding yesterday. RECIPE OF THE DAY Christopher Testani for The New York Times Here’s a weekend project that pays out long: lasagna. It’s a recipe that Regina Schrambling brought to The Times in 2001, during the dark days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it has been delivering comfort ever since. Follow it for a classic Italian American casserole, informed by Regina’s reporting and testing across the Italian playbook. To wit, an intensely flavored tomato sauce, multiple cheeses melted into creaminess, ground beef and crumbled Italian sausages layered between tender sheets of pasta. The resulting combination, baked until bubbling, proves the axiom that all-day lasagna is the only kind worth making. BEST IN SHOW A toy poodle contestant in 1993. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times The 150th Westminster Dog Show gets underway in New York City tomorrow. Photographers have covered the event since around the 1930s, and we took a dive into our archives to find images of some of the very best doggos who have come before. Click, obvs. More on culture Did Trump give the rapper Nicki Minaj a $1 million “gold card” visa? She said he did, but it’s not what it seems, the White House said. Wynton Marsalis said yesterday that he would be stepping down from Jazz at Lincoln Center after nearly 40 years. “Marsalis’s larger-than-life presence and prominence will not be easy to replicate,” writes Robin Pogrebin, who covers the arts. “He has become a worldwide ambassador for jazz, as comfortable schmoozing with celebrities like Spike Lee and Barack Obama as he is explaining Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis to middle schoolers.” The actor Hank Azaria has a Bruce Springsteen cover band. (He plays Bruce.) The actor Michael Shannon has an R.E.M. cover band. (He’s Michael Stipe.) Melena Ryzik, an arts reporter, recently talked with them about their musical sidelines. “I don’t think it’s going to lead to more lucrative opportunities,” Shannon said. Late night hosts joked about the new “Melania” documentary. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Plan ahead for once. These are the best boxed chocolates for Valentine’s Day, selected by the romantics at Wirecutter. Listen to Bruno Mars’s “I Just Might.” It’s our pop music critic Jon Caramanica’s song of the week. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was theology. 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 P.S. Believing, our new newsletter, has been covering how people are supporting each other in Minnesota. If you have a story, tell us here. 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 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 February 2 Author Members Posted February 2 January 31, 2026 Good morning. Let’s talk about the new and old shows we’ll be watching this winter. María Jesús Contreras Good company By Melissa Kirsch “The Pitt” returned for its second season recently, and I realized I’d been anticipating its premiere the way one greets the impending arrival of old friends: excitement at seeing the characters again, curiosity about what they’ve been up to, wondering if we’ll be able to pick up with the same intimacy as before. That cozy familiarity with the characters on shows we love is one of the rewards of being a fan. When the real world feels hostile and unpredictable, there’s comfort in returning to a familiar cast, characters whose behavior is scripted by a team of writers. But what of the long-ended show that returns, zombie-like, from the dead? The critic Mike Hale recently issued his list of shows to watch this winter, and there are some surprising ones. For instance, have you heard “Scrubs” is coming back after 16 years, with all its stars intact? (ABC, Feb. 25) And fancy seeing you here, “Malcolm in the Middle”! The last time we talked was in 2006 and you were dashing out to get some cigarettes. (It’s back as a mini-series. Hulu, April 10.) I can’t say I’m getting the same warm feeling imagining a visit with these characters the way I did about the personnel of “The Pitt,” but I am betting there are many for whom these familiar faces will provide comfort. I’m more excited about “The Forsytes” (PBS, March 22). It’s a prequel to the events of John Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Saga” novels and the perfect, in my memory, 2002 mini-series. The old characters are back (Soames! Irene! If these names mean nothing to you, I’m jealous — you have a delightful binge ahead) but with new actors. Stephen Moyer (“True Blood”) as Old Jolyon seems like a brilliant fit. There’s a new “Game of Thrones” spinoff, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (HBO, Jan. 18). Tom Brady narrates “Rise of the 49ers,” a four-episode documentary (AMC, Feb. 1). “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” looks exciting: Tracy Morgan plays a former football player, Daniel Radcliffe a filmmaker helping him rehab his tarnished image. Tina Fey and some of her “30 Rock” crew are behind it (NBC, Feb. 23). Kerry Washington and Elisabeth Moss as old friends? Yes, in “Imperfect Women,” wherein a third friend is murdered (Apple TV, March 18). And David E. Kelley’s interpretation of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” will intrigue the many who loved Rufi Thorpe’s novel. It stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Elle Fanning (Apple TV, April 15). Pfeiffer will always feel to me like an old friend, as she will forever live in my memory as Stephanie Zinone from the underrated 1982 masterpiece, “Grease 2.” I don’t know that I would recommend you watch that one before “The Forsyte Saga,” but it has its own dramatic allure. THE LATEST NEWS Immigration A memorial for Alex Pretti In Minneapolis. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times The Justice Department, in a reversal, said it would open a civil rights investigation into the shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis. Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who now works as an independent journalist, was arrested in connection with a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minn. Lemon said he was covering the protest, not participating in it. The Senate passed a bipartisan spending package to fund most of the government while Democrats and President Trump negotiate ICE reforms. In an internal memo this week, ICE gave its agents broader power to arrest people without a warrant. “Craftivists” are knitting red tasseled hats to galvanize opposition to ICE, and to mourn the two Minnesotans killed by federal agents. Epstein Files The Justice Department released more than three million pages of documents from its Jeffrey Epstein investigation, along with thousands of photos and videos. Here are takeaways. The release includes revelations about Epstein’s relationships with Elon Musk; the Google co-founder Sergey Brin; a co-owner of the New York Giants, Steve Tisch; and Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick. The documents show that the F.B.I. put together a summary of more than a dozen unverified tips involving Trump. International The United Nations says it is facing imminent financial collapse and will run out of money by July if countries — namely the U.S. — do not pay their dues. Iran will not engage in direct negotiations with the U.S. unless Trump stops threatening it, the country’s foreign minister said. Argentina may soon become a destination for U.S. deportations. Other Big Stories Luigi Mangione won’t face the death penalty in his trial over the killing of the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare. Elena Rybakina won her first Australian Open title, beating Aryna Sabalenka in three sets. Texas A&M University is ending its women’s studies program. Hundreds of courses have altered their syllabuses to limit the teaching of race and gender issues. A winter storm has the potential to drop a historic amount of snow on the coastal areas of the Carolinas. THE WEEK IN CULTURE ‘Melania’ Melania and Donald Trump at the Kennedy Center this week. Eric Lee for The New York Times “Melania,” a new documentary about Melania Trump, follows the first lady in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s 2025 inauguration. Read our review. The red carpet at the film’s Kennedy Center premiere this week featured a who’s who of right-wing influencers and Republican officials. Amazon is spending $35 million to promote the film — 10 times what other studios have spent to hype high-profile documentaries. Grammys The Grammy Awards are tomorrow. The hosts of “Popcast,” The Times’s pop music show, explain why they think Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter should win. If you want to be on the cutting edge, our critic Lindsay Zoladz has a primer (and a playlist) for the Best New Artist nominees. More Culture Catherine O’Hara in 2019. Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times Catherine O’Hara, who got her start on the cult comedy show “SCTV” and went on to star in hits like “Home Alone” and “Schitt’s Creek,” has died at 71. Call it Brontë-maxxing: Ahead of the release of a new film adaptation, young readers are diving into “Wuthering Heights,” often with friends. The Shakers, 19th-century utopians famous for communal living and ecstatic worship, are having a modern renaissance. Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Ghost of Yotei are both samurai action games set in long-ago Japan. In the video below, Zachary Small explains the differences — and which one you should get. Click to play. The New York Times The Times Sale ends soon: Expand your knowledge with our experts. Take advantage of our best offer and gain understanding and insight in every area of life. Just $1 a week for your first year of unlimited access to news, culture, cooking and more. CULTURE CALENDAR By Alexis Soloski “The Muppet Show” (Thursday): Have you lately felt a dearth of the most sensational? The inspirational? The celebrational? Then rejoice: “The Muppet Show” has returned, as Kermit the Frog says, “back on the very stage where it all started and then ended and is maybe starting again, depending on how tonight goes.” An exemplar of kiddie sketch comedy and puppeteering panache, the show will arrive on Disney+ and ABC for a revival special, with the usual fleece and polyfoam stars as well as special guests including Maya Rudolph, Sabrina Carpenter and Seth Rogen. Carpenter, a recent Grammy winner, has big Miss Piggy energy. (Complimentary.) RECIPE OF THE WEEK Kate Sears for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Hadas Smirnoff. By Melissa Clark Chile Crisp Fettuccine Alfredo This weekend, let’s bid goodbye to January with a spicy, buttery bang, namely Genevieve Ko’s chile crisp fettuccine Alfredo with spinach. Don’t let the simple technique and minimalist ingredient list fool you; this creamy dish can really pack a wallop. Toasting the chile crisp in butter increases its complex, toasty notes that are rounded out by the Parmesan and heavy cream, and baby spinach adds freshness and color. Even better, you don’t need to get out your knife. This speedy, no-chop recipe practically cooks itself. REAL ESTATE Jodie Horton at home in New Orleans. Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times The Hunt: A New Orleans-based doctor and her partner, planning ahead, sought a condo in Panama for their retirement. Which did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $950,000: A Greek Revival in Charleston, S.C.; a Cape Cod in Roxbury, Conn.; and a midcentury modern home in Denver. D.I.Y.: For home renovations, the smaller version of a tool is generally the better one. Toxic smoke: After a Times investigation, a California lawmaker wants science-based standards, not insurance companies, to determine whether it’s safe to move back into a home after a wildfire. LIVING Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times Escape: Take a break from the snow and cold in Vieques, a small isle just east of Puerto Rico’s main island that attracts travelers with its raw beauty and uncrowded beaches. The new guidance counselor: People use A.I. chatbots as doctors, therapists, even friends. Now some high schoolers are using them for help with college decisions. I ate it: These mushroom gummies claim to stimulate your brain. Do they work? ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER CB2 Make your lighting more serene If your LED bulbs flicker, buzz or just make the room feel washed-out, don’t fret; it doesn’t have to be this way. Upgrading to higher-quality bulbs can prevent your home from feeling like a drab office building. And for more tranquillity, layer your lighting. Many people think lights need to be high up and overhead. But lower lights can have a calming effect, like the setting sun. Wirecutter’s home décor experts recommend several durable, well-designed floor lamps — all of which cast a mood-setting glow and look lovely, even when unlit. — Annemarie Conte GAME OF THE WEEK Novak Djokovic celebrates during his semifinal match. Tingshu Wang/Reuters Novak Djokovic vs. Carlos Alcaraz, Australian Open men’s final: Novak Djokovic has won this tournament 10 times, more than anyone else. But he had begun to worry that he could no longer keep up with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, the young stars who have dominated the sport in the past couple of years. “It will be very difficult for me in the future to overcome the hurdle of Sinner, Alcaraz, in the best-of-five on the Grand Slams,” the 38-year-old Djokovic said last year, after losing to Alcaraz in the U.S. Open. But he overcame that hurdle on Friday, outlasting Sinner in a five-set classic that went more than four hours. Alcaraz, for his part, won an extraordinary five-hour semifinal, playing through an illness that had him vomiting into a towel between games. Alcaraz will now try to earn his first Australian Open title — and the distinction, at 22 years old, of being the youngest player to complete a career Grand Slam. Sunday at 3:30 a.m. Eastern on ESPN (and a replay at 9 a.m. on ESPN2, if you can avoid spoilers). NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was hourlong. 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 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 February 2 Author Members Posted February 2 February 1, 2026 Good morning. The U.S. government remains partly shut down. Protesters across the U.S. rallied yesterday against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And in Texas, a Democrat won a special election in a historically conservative district. We have more news below, but first one of our colleagues shares her remarkable story of amputation and reinvention. The writer in the kitchen at her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times A new kind of cook By Yewande Komolafe I’m a recipe developer, columnist and video host for The Times. I was born with sickle cell disease, an inherited blood disorder. It doesn’t hinder my passion for food, but I had to learn to navigate the world with balance — alternating periods of exertion and rest to prevent a painful crisis. One such crisis began in December 2023. I went to a New York City hospital for what I thought would be a routine stay. Six weeks later, I woke from a coma in a different hospital. A tube helped me breathe. Eventually, doctors would amputate my legs and my fingers. After seven months in the hospital, I went home in an ambulance. Eventually, I’d acquire an electric wheelchair and prosthetic hands and legs. Throughout my two-decade career as a cook — working in restaurants and test kitchens, developing recipes and writing cookbooks — I have been aware of limitations: the hottest temperature I could quickly coax flavor from carrots, how impulsively I could move my body without eliciting a sickle cell crisis. Now I would face my greatest limitations yet. I was certain I would return to the kitchen. I just needed to figure out how. Adaptation In the hospital, a friend would visit me with pastries. That’s how I first encountered the brown butter cornmeal cake from Radio Bakery in Brooklyn. It was assertive in its nuttiness, an exquisite balance of sweet and savory, with a crunchy exterior and a dense, pillowy softness within. It was the perfect complement to the first sips of coffee I could manage. I knew I wanted to bake a version of it. When I got home, I had to rediscover myself — as a person, a wife, a mother and a cook. A daily rotation of home health aides assisted me with the mundane tasks of bathing and dressing. Yewande, right, with her assistant Stasia de Tilly, left. Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times I began dreaming of the foods I yearned to make. So much of my body had changed, but I still had my sense of taste and smell, my culinary knowledge, my ability to eye when a dish is cooked just right. But when I returned to work as a columnist and recipe developer last April, I now needed the help of a cooking assistant who would act as my hands. The inspiration for my recipes still begins as a sensory image evocative enough to pine for, or a thought that floats across my mind. But how I write them down has changed, as I talk to my computer and rely on its accessibility software to record my words in text form. (Sometimes, it doesn’t understand my Nigerian accent until I enunciate the syllables in a clipped tone.) Each day, my rotating cast of assistants and I begin at my kitchen table, going over a recipe step by step. They’re in charge of chopping and slicing ingredients, cooking the dish, navigating the too-tall counters and impossible-to-open cabinets. I watch, touch, listen, taste and take in the aromas. I try to lead with kindness, and I don’t mind repeating myself. I’m not always successful. I sometimes get impatient sharing a space that was once mine alone. And there’s the frustration of needing to ask for help while giving guidance. It’s odd to lead my personal kitchen brigade without the ability to show the best method for folding butter into dough for delicately thin layers. I’ve tried to focus on the skills I still have and consign to the future the ones I must relearn using my new prosthetic limbs, like how to whisk a bowl of cream to milky soft peaks. Nearly two years into my recovery, I finally got around to adapting the recipe for the brown butter cornmeal cake. It’s inspired by a classic French brown butter financier, substituting coarse ground cornmeal for the traditional almond flour, while turbinado sugar gently sweetens the cake and gives it a crunchy exterior. I added my own touch: cherries for their tartness and fleshy texture (fresh or frozen; sour, Bing or dark sweet cherries will work). Here it is: Brown butter cornmeal cake. Julia Gartland for The New York Times Revival In a life spent traversing long distances, my journey back to the kitchen has been one of the greatest distances I’ve ever traveled. Cooking was once my time to reflect on the past and the future as I stood stirring or watching something come together in a pan, planning articles, recipes, cookbooks. Now so much of my life is spent leaning on others, and making food is no longer a solitary and meditative act. It calls to mind a phrase in Yoruba, “A jọ ṣé pọ̀,” meaning, “We do it together” or “We collaborate.” This has become a refrain that I recite while I’m writing recipes, sharing meals with loved ones and performing the once simple tasks of everyday life. I’m still very much in recovery. I’ve had my prosthetic hands for several months; I’m now learning to walk on my new legs. But I relish the curative effects — physiologically and psychologically — of food. Sometimes it’s a Nigerian dish that, for a brief moment, sends me back to the kitchen of my childhood home in Lagos. Even a pedestrian dish like fried calamari or shrimp scampi can excite my will to live. I find myself marveling at how little it takes to feel alive. THE LATEST NEWS Immigration Liam Conejo Ramos Columbia Heights Public Schools, via Agence France-Presse A judge condemned the detention of Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, and his father and ordered them released from custody. Chicago’s mayor has ordered city police to document aggressive and potentially illegal actions by federal immigration agents. A judge denied a request to temporarily block a surge of immigration agents in Minnesota. A Trump administration policy intended to detain immigrants indefinitely has led to a slew of lawsuits, overwhelming some federal courts. Politics Newly released files related to Jeffrey Epstein show that his connections with the global elite thrived even after he became a convicted sex offender. The Pentagon, in response to a lawsuit filed by The Times, said its restrictions on media organizations were a reasonable initiative to balance national security with access. News that Usha Vance is expecting a fourth child has made her a symbol of success for conservative family values. International In Gaza yesterday. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times Israel launched a series of airstrikes on Gaza yesterday in an attack that local health officials called the deadliest in weeks. In Canada, the Conservative Party voted to keep a populist inspired by President Trump as its leader despite his defeat in last year’s election. Danish veterans who fought alongside U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan took to the streets to protest Trump’s comments about NATO allies. War in Ukraine A second round of trilateral talks to end the war has been postponed after a surprise meeting between Russian and U.S. negotiators in Florida. The price of Russian oil has plummeted, but there is little sign that economic strains will cause Vladimir Putin to change his calculations on the war. Health Some hospitals now require that older doctors undergo testing for cognitive decline. A decades-long study suggests that having a good relationship with your parents as a teenager could lead to more friendships as an adult. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Bill Belichick was not elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame this year, his first time on the ballot. Should he have been? Yes. The decision is an embarrassment that damages the legitimacy of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “If winning six Super Bowls as New England Patriots coach — more than any coach in history — doesn’t ensure induction, then nothing will,” Jarrett Bell writes for USA Today. No. Belichick was involved in unforgettable scandals with the New England Patriots, and his personal life may have also skewed some votes. “Belichick can still be recognized as an all-time great, even with a little wait,” Vinnie Iyer writes for The Sporting News. FROM OPINION More than 1,700 children have been placed in custody since immigrant family detention centers reopened. It’s past time for more humane alternatives, writes Elora Mukherjee. Here is a column by Nicholas Kristof on the two Americas that Alex Pretti and Gregory Bovino represent. The Times Sale ends soon: Expand your knowledge with our experts. Take advantage of our best offer and gain understanding and insight in every area of life. Just $1 a week for your first year of unlimited access to news, culture, cooking and more. MORNING READS Milissa Kaufman, a psychiatrist and researcher. Haruka Sakaguchi for The New York Times Voice inside my head: Spurred by her own experiences with one of psychiatry’s most misunderstood diagnoses, Milissa Kaufman devoted her professional life to studying it. Model S: Tesla said it would stop making the car. But experts regard it as one of the most important vehicles in the history of the auto industry. Stay gold: New musicals on Broadway keep losing money. Except one: “The Outsiders,” an adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 coming-of-age novel, is the first to become profitable since 2022. High fashion: In the video below, Vanessa Friedman, our chief fashion critic, breaks down the best looks from the couture week in Paris. Click to watch. The New York Times SPORTS Tennis: Carlos Alcaraz beat Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open final to complete a career Grand Slam. Boxing: After the heavyweight Jarrell Miller started losing his hairpiece during a fight last night at Madison Square Garden, he pulled it off and threw it into the crowd. BOOK OF THE WEEK By Elisabeth Egan “Football,” by Chuck Klosterman: Just in time for Super Bowl season, here’s a best-selling book to get you in the mood. Klosterman, a cultural critic and lifelong fan, parses the game for neophytes and for humans of the future where, he writes, “Football will be described in the same way we currently recall Roman gladiators, an enforced memory that’s mostly wrong.” With humor, self-deprecation and appropriate gravity, he considers why the sport is so popular; how it serves as the ultimate icebreaker among strangers; and whether it’s being unfairly targeted for health risks to players. “Football” is not a polemic, nor is it a love letter. Think of it as a time capsule you don’t need to wait to open, packed with artifacts that are fun to sift through whether you watched “Friday Night Lights” or not. THE INTERVIEW Mayor Jacob Frey. Philip Montgomery for The New York Times By Lulu Garcia-Navarro This week’s subject for The Interview is Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, whom I spoke with in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. Gov. Tim Walz has called on people to videotape ICE agents. That is, of course, legal, but do you agree that politicians should be encouraging that? Sunlight is the best disinfectant. So do I support people actively recording what’s taking place in public? Yeah, I support that, absolutely. I mean, it’s called “in public” for a reason. Imagine if we didn’t have some of these recordings. Imagine if the shooting that took place recently of Alex Pretti was not recorded for everybody to see. Then we’d be running with these garbage narratives that are created by the federal government that are false, and we’d all be living in a lie. One of the things that also struck me about the protest movement is how it’s really shown the limits of what politicians can do, especially at a local level. Earlier this week, Anderson Cooper from CNN interviewed Stella Carlson, a woman who captured video of Alex Pretti being shot and killed, and she said, “I think people are feeling like there’s nobody here to help us, there’s nobody who can step in to protect us.” What would you say to that? First, let me applaud the tens of thousands of people in Minneapolis and in Minnesota that have been standing up for their neighbors. Perhaps that’s a phrase that gets overly used, “standing up for your neighbors,” but they are doing it in such beautiful form, whether that’s encouraging constitutional conduct through videotaping and transparency or taking your neighbor that is terrified to go outside to the grocery store or collecting food and giving it to them or standing watch outside of a day care. I mean, we have seen so many people stand up for their neighbors, and I’ve never been prouder to be part of Minneapolis. Of course there are limitations on what we’re able to do at any level of government. And there are also those limitations that are not just baked in under the law, but also baked in on the practical reality of where we find ourselves right now. Explain. We’re not going to outgun the federal government. Not to mention that would be wildly dangerous for the very communities that we want to protect. Nobody wants that. Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Photo illustration by Mike McQuade. Source photographs: Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Nathan Howard/Reuters; Shiiko Alexander/Alamy. Read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Order a pie from Pizza Studio Tamaki, a Tokyo pizzeria that’s coming to New York City. Watch “Heated Rivalry,” the global television phenomenon whose secret sauce is Canada, our correspondent writes from Ottawa. Check your I.D. As of today, passengers without a government-approved Real ID will be asked to pay $45 for alternative screening at U.S. airports. MEAL PLAN Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Spencer Richards. Snowed in for the weekend? You wouldn’t be the only one. Anything can happen this time of year, so it’s never a bad idea to load up on ingredients for some tried-and-true meals. Emily Weinstein’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter has some great ones, starting with Ali Slagle’s chicken and white bean stew recipe. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was airflow. Can you put eight historical events — including Newton’s law of gravity, the rise of Zeppelins and the first book of crossword puzzles — 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 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 February 4 Author Members Posted February 4 February 2, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. It’s Groundhog Day. The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt reopened today after nearly a year. And Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar were the big winners at the Grammys last night, in a show that got political. (See who else won.) We’ll get to all of it, and more, below. But first, I’m going to turn to my sports-obsessed colleague Tom Wright-Piersanti for a preview of the Winter Olympics in Italy. They start this week. The biathlon venue. Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Games on by Tom Wright-Piersanti The Olympics begin this week. Unless you live in northern Italy or obsessively follow snow sports, though, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that. The Winter Games are low-key. That’s what makes them fun. The Summer Olympics, with track and swimming, showcase the strongest and fastest. The Winter Games are more about artistry. They have athletes clad in spandex sliding down ice tubes. They have curling. Today, I’ll help you get ready for the 19-day extravaganza and point you toward some great stories in The Times and The Athletic. Let’s begin with the basics: Where are the games? When do they start? How do I watch? Officially, it’s called the Milan Cortina Games. But there are actually events throughout northern Italy — skiing and snowboarding spread across the Alps, hockey and figure skating in Milan. The opening ceremony is Friday and will feature performances by Mariah Carey and the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. But there are a handful of events before that, including curling on Wednesday and snowboarding on Thursday. The Games are being broadcast by NBC, as usual, and Peacock will stream every event live. Italy is six hours ahead of New York and nine ahead of California, so if you need to know what’s happening as it happens, you might have to sneak some peeks during the workday. I’ve heard of Milan. What is this Cortina? The full name is Cortina d’Ampezzo. It’s a gem of a village in the Dolomites, a mountain range in the country’s north. Our travel writer described it as a “snow playground for the conspicuously wealthy.” I’m not wealthy, conspicuously or inconspicuously, so no surprise that I hadn’t heard of the place, but the photos make it look pretty incredible. And it will be home to some of the most exciting events of the Games. It has the Sliding Center, which hosts bobsled, luge and skeleton. And it has the Curling Stadium, where, naturally, curling happens. Why do you keep bringing up curling? Curling at the 2022 Winter Olympics. James Hill for The New York Times It’s just the best. There is no sport that more quickly converts a person from “this looks silly” to “I am extremely invested.” It helps that the competitors are entirely ordinary-looking — that could be you or me out there, if only we had been better at sweeping in our youth — and that the rules are easy to understand. It’s like a game you might play on a lawn or in a pub. Competitors try to slide heavy stones (they call them rocks, and they weigh around 40 pounds) closer to the target than the other team’s. There’s shouting and bumping and, of course, the aforementioned sweeping. Here’s a guide. You said these Olympics were low-key. Has the lead-up been boring? Anything but! For one, the building of the hockey rink in Milan has been a debacle. Times reporters attended test games a few weeks ago and found a construction site: Two levels of the venue were off limits to spectators, with sheets of black plastic concealing rows of seats. Paint splattered the floors, and construction dust coated railings. Large wires poked out of walls… The Trump administration stirred some controversy when the Department of Homeland Security announced that ICE agents would accompany the U.S. delegation to the Games. Italian politicians were outraged. A spokeswoman for the agency said ICE was going only to “vet and mitigate risks,” not to carry out immigration actions. And then, of course, there’s the crotch-stitching controversy. The what controversy? This scandal has rocked Norway, a country that takes great pride in its winter-sports prowess. Officials on its national ski-jumping team were caught modifying the crotches of their jumpers’ suits at last year’s world championships, thanks to a secret video that was posted anonymously to YouTube. Matthew Futterman, who has covered every Olympics since 2010, says the modifications are a simple matter of physics: “Ski jumpers want to fly through the air as far as possible. A bigger suit provides more lift, like a larger sail catches more wind.” And the easiest place to enlarge, he notes, “is in the crotch.” OK, enough of that. Who are the athletes on Team U.S.A. I should know about? Mikaela Shiffrin at the 2022 Winter Olympics. Doug Mills/The New York Times There are 232 of them, but I’ll highlight a few. In Alpine skiing, Mikaela Shiffrin, the sport’s most decorated athlete, had a nightmare Olympics in 2022 — three crashes, no medals. But she has excelled since then, and so has the rest of the U.S. squad, which enters these Games as the sport’s dominant team. Watch also for Lindsey Vonn, 41, who is trying to complete a comeback after five years of retirement, a partial knee replacement and a crash on Friday. In speedskating, the headliner is Jordan Stolz, who is 21 and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. He’s favored to win gold in all four events he’s competing in. And in figure skating, the U.S. hasn’t won a women’s individual medal in 20 years. Amber Glenn and Alysa Liu have a real shot at changing that. On the men’s side, Ilia Malinin, nicknamed the “Quad God” for his quadruple jumps, is a favorite to win gold. And you have to cheer for Maxim Naumov. This is his first Olympics, and it comes just over a year after his parents — both former Olympians, and also his coaches — were killed in the horrific midair plane collision over Washington. We’ll have daily Olympics highlights in The Morning. But you can sign up to the Games Briefing to get a full recap in your inbox from The Athletic. Now, let’s see what else is going on in the world. THE LATEST NEWS Politics It’s been a year since President Trump began raising tariffs. These five charts show their impact on the economy. Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old detained by ICE, and his father are back home in Minnesota after a judge demanded their release from an immigration detention facility in Texas. Trump said that the Kennedy Center will close for a two-year reconstruction project starting this summer. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has released a memoir. It explores his marriages and airs a little dirty laundry — but says relatively little about politics. An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company last year. The Epstein Files The Times dug through a new batch of Epstein files and found more than 5,300 of them contained references to Trump or related terms — his wife, Mar-a-Lago. None include direct communication between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. The files shed new light on Epstein’s relationships with several prominent figures, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Howard Lutnick, now the commerce secretary. International The Rafah border crossing. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Israel and Egypt had disagreed for months about how to resume operations at Gaza’s Rafah border crossing. The decision to reopen it today is a step forward in a fragile cease-fire. Costa Rica elected a right-wing candidate as its next president. Her campaign focused on rising crime in the country. A co-writer of the Oscar-nominated film “It Was Just an Accident,” was arrested in Iran after signing a letter criticizing the regime. A Russian strike near a coal mine in Eastern Ukraine killed at least 12 miners. China An industry trading in secretly filmed footage of women and girls has flourished online in China. Beijing wants to lead the world in developing A.I., but it also wants companies to adhere to an increasingly complex set of rules. Other Big Stories Artificial snow in Midway, Utah, last month. Matthew Hamon While much of the Eastern U.S. is recording snowfall, a snow drought in the West threatens water resources for the rest of the year. A drug that encourages muscle growth and bone density that hasn’t been approved for humans is showing up in elite athletes. OPINIONS Autocratic leaders’ meglomania has historically backfired. This might be happening in the U.S. as public sentiment turns against Trump, Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes. Here are columns by David French on the risks ahead of the midterms and Ezra Klein on the limits of Trump’s flood-the-zone strategy. The Times Sale ends soon: Expand your knowledge with our experts. Take advantage of our best offer and gain understanding and insight in every area of life. Just $1 a week for your first year of unlimited access to news, culture, cooking and more. MORNING READS In Yiwu, China. Nicoco Chan/Reuters Factory error: A sad toy horse has captured something deeper about modern life in China. Level up: Preteen athletes are getting personal trainers to be competitive in youth sports leagues. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about a Democrat winning a special election in Texas. Metropolitan Diary: “Your money’s sticking out.” TODAY’S NUMBER 2.6 million — That is the area, in square feet, of the new Terminal One at Kennedy International Airport in New York. It could house more than 40 American football fields. SPORTS N.F.L.: Mike LaFleur has been hired as the Arizona Cardinals’ head coach. Golf: Justin Rose won the Farmers Insurance Open, finishing at 23-under-par. N.B.A.: LeBron James will be an All-Star for the 22nd consecutive time. RECIPE OF THE DAY Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Today’s the day to sketch out a plan for your Super Bowl feast on Sunday. Do this even if you’re not a Seahawks or Patriots fan, even if you aren’t going to watch. The weather in much of the country has been terrible for days and days. Warm up with a party, of sorts. Our Cooking app has loads of recipes appropriate for the celebration. I’m thinking oven-baked wings, a mess of ribs, loaded nachos and plenty of dips. THE GRAMMY AWARDS Bad Bunny Mario Anzuoni/Reuters Bad Bunny won three Grammy Awards last night, including album of the year. It was the first time a Spanish-language album has won the awards’ most prestigious prize. The 31-year-old Puerto Rican singer and rapper used one of his speeches to criticize Trump’s immigration crackdown: “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens — we are humans.” Trump criticized the Grammys on social media after the broadcast ended. The other big winners were Kendrick Lamar, who took home five trophies; Olivia Dean, who won best new artist; and “KPop Demon Hunters,” which won K-Pop’s first ever Grammy. Look at the boldest outfits on the red carpet. More on culture Ben Brantley, a former theater critic for The Times, takes a close look at Lesley Manville’s stunning, hypnotic monologue in the modern retelling of “Oedipus” that’s currently on Broadway. The silence that accompanies it is thrilling, he writes: “It’s the deep quiet of an entire audience listening to a single performer speak as if everyone’s lives, on and off stage, somehow depended on what is being said.” Wesley Morris sat down with Sasha Weiss, a culture editor, on his “Cannonball” podcast to talk about “Marty Supreme” and the people who hate it — who hate, in particular, the character Marty Supreme. Here’s why. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Read “Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Brontë, with the Book Review Book Club. Take inventory of your medicine cabinet to make room for what you actually need. Here’s how. Save money and look great with the best drugstore makeup and skin care products tested by the thrifty aestheticians at Wirecutter. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were ballooning and billabong. 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 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 February 4 Author Members Posted February 4 February 3, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. We’re gearing up to report live from the Westminster Dog Show in New York, and we hope you’ll follow along. And there’s a lot more (serious) news below. Let’s start in Gaza. Ambulances on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing waiting to enter Gaza this week. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A literal lifeline The border crossing between Gaza and Egypt opened a crack yesterday, a potential starting point in improving conditions for Palestinians in Gaza. The Times called it “a symbolic, if halting, step forward in Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas.” The crossing, in Rafah, at Gaza’s southern border, has been closed for most of the two-year war. Reopening it was a requirement of President Trump’s peace plan for the territory. Yesterday, Palestinians hoping to leave the enclave headed toward it. One of them was Mohammed Mahdi, 25. He was with his father, who was wounded in April 2024 in an Israeli airstrike. Shrapnel ripped into his face, blinding him in one eye and damaging the other. Doctors in Gaza could not do much more than stabilize him, Mahdi told The Times. “Finally, we can get advanced treatment abroad,” he said. To help us understand the significance of the reopening, I reached out to David Halbfinger, who leads the team of Times journalists who cover Israel, Gaza and the occupied West Bank. I had some questions. What’s so special about this one crossing? Gaza has been under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since Hamas took control of the enclave in 2007, and throughout that period Rafah was the only border crossing not controlled by Israel. That made it a metaphorical lifeline for many Palestinians — a vital connection to the rest of the world. When the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, ignited the war with Hamas, Rafah became the only potential escape route from Gaza, and tens of thousands flocked to the south in hopes of fleeing the conflict. That lifeline was severed when Israel captured the city of Rafah in May 2024 and shut down the crossing. It became impossible for most Palestinians to leave Gaza. It also stranded many Palestinians outside the territory. Some were able to seek medical treatment abroad when the crossing reopened during a short-lived cease-fire in early 2025. But United Nations officials say that around 18,500 people — 4,000 of them children — still need to leave to get treatment for war wounds or serious illnesses. For the injured, Rafah is a literal lifeline, and its reopening represents the difference between hope and despair. In Gaza yesterday. Ramadan Abed/Reuters What does it really mean to “open” Rafah? It’s not like the opening of a new bridge or highway. For starters, everyone crossing at Rafah is required to be on foot, and they aren’t being permitted to carry much with them other than clothes. (Food, medicine and other supplies enter Gaza at a different crossing.) The Rafah crossing is being set up with multiple layers of security. These include Egyptian and Israeli authorities, security officers from a European border-monitoring team and officers of the Palestinian Authority. With so many different entities involved, and none of them readily providing answers so far, it is difficult to get clarity on some basic questions — such as how people are cleared to make the trip, what circumstances can help people skip to the front of the line, or even how many people made it through yesterday. It appeared to take many hours for a very small number of people to cross in either direction. Why wasn’t all of that resolved during the negotiations to open the crossing? While some of it is likely a matter of working out the kinks of a complicated logistical setup, it may also be at least partly by design. Many members of Israel’s right-wing government still harbor dreams of depopulating and resettling the Gaza Strip. A few days ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Israel would limit those entering to about 50 on any given day. But, he added, Israel was “not going to prevent anyone from leaving.” There are many more questions that need to be answered. The Israeli military also announced, for example, that the only people it would allow to return to Gaza are those who left during the war. That excludes many who happened to be abroad on Oct. 7 and have been unable to return since. It’s unclear how long Israel will stick to that policy. What does this mean for Israel and Gaza? That’s also complicated. On one level, this is obviously a positive milestone. And yet, even setting aside the Israeli extremists who would prefer that Gaza be emptied out, there are plenty of Israeli Jews who don’t have much empathy for the Palestinians after Oct. 7. There’s also enormous skepticism about the Trump peace plan, which required Rafah to reopen. But Israel isn’t in a position to be dismissing the Trump administration’s wishes — certainly not when it is so dependent on the administration’s support in its dealings with Lebanon, Syria and, of course, Iran. So there seems to be a sense of resignation that Israel needs to go along with the administration’s plan, at least until it becomes clear whether Hamas will fulfill the requirements that it disarm and that Gaza be demilitarized. In that sense, opening Rafah can be seen as a step toward calling Hamas’s bluff. And for Egypt? For Egypt, reopening Rafah raises its own set of problems. Many Palestinians are already living in Egypt in a kind of limbo, and the government is about as interested in getting an influx of more Gazan refugees as Israel is interested in having Palestinian émigrés flood back into Gaza. So it will be interesting, and perhaps revealing, to watch and compare the numbers of people traveling through Rafah in each direction. Though Palestinians impatient to get on with their lives — either by leaving Gaza, or by returning home to pick up the pieces — may have some strong feelings about what promises to be quite a bottleneck there. THE LATEST NEWS Politics After F.B.I. agents searched an election center in Georgia and seized truckloads of 2020 ballots, they met with Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. Then she did something unusual. She put them on speakerphone with Trump. After The Times reported that Trump had dropped his demand that Harvard pay the White House $200 million, he said he was now seeking $1 billion “in damages.” Trump called for Republicans to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states on a podcast with the former F.B.I. official Dan Bongino. The conservative group Turning Point USA will stream a concert with Kid Rock during the Super Bowl halftime show. It’s meant to counter the N.F.L.’s official show featuring Bad Bunny, who has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration. Judges The New York Times After a series of Supreme Court leaks, the chief justice made some employees sign nondisclosure agreements. In the video above, Jodi Kantor, an investigative reporter, explains how the court has become more secretive. Click to watch. A judge barred further changes to George Washington’s Philadelphia house after the National Park Service removed videos and placards about Washington’s involvement with slavery. A judge struck down the government’s attempt to block a wind farm off the coast of New York. It’s the fifth consecutive loss for Trump’s efforts to halt offshore wind projects. The Epstein Files Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to testify in the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The British and Norwegian royal families are facing criticism over their ties to Epstein. Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, discussed women in emails with Epstein. The N.F.L. commissioner said the league would look into the men’s relationship. Government Shutdown Some House Republicans are threatening to block the deal Trump made with Democrats to reopen most of the federal government. The release of January’s jobs report has been delayed because of the partial government shutdown. Immigration Crackdown After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, fake images spreading online show how A.I. is distorting reality. A civil rights lawyer is speaking out after the White House shared a doctored photo of her arrest. Democrats are calling for the Department of Homeland Security to expedite its investigation into the use of force by immigration agents after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. International In Tehran, a billboard of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that reads: “We recognize the American president as a criminal.” Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times U.S. and Iranian officials are expected to meet in Istanbul on Friday for talks aimed at de-escalating tensions. Chinese generals are disappearing. For three years, Xi Jinping has been ousting the military elite. Trump announced an initial U.S. trade deal with India. While short on details, it would require both countries to reduce their tariffs and India to stop purchasing Russian oil. Russia resumed large-scale attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, targeting power plants in at least six regions overnight. Other Big Stories Elon Musk merged SpaceX with his A.I. start-up, creating the most valuable private company on earth. It is worth more than $1 trillion. On the new A.I.-only social network Moltbook, thousands of chatbots are discussing topics such as cryptocurrency sales and the nature of consciousness. CHILLING EFFECT El Guanaco, a restaurant and bakery with several locations around the Twin Cities. Yasmin Yassin for The New York Times Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Minnesota, nearing its third month, is taking a toll on local stores and restaurants. Sales have plummeted by nearly half at CentroMex Grocery, owned by a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Colombia. Federal agents drove by the store for weeks, and four of its 10 employees have disappeared, terrified to come to work. Traffic at the Minneapolis location of El Guanaco, a restaurant and bakery that serves pupusas and tacos, has plunged by 80 percent, and three other locations have cut their hours and staff. Official data may not be available for a while, but the city of Minneapolis estimates that companies are losing around $20 million in revenue each week. Read more about the economic fallout. OPINIONS Beyond the spectacle of ICE violence, Americans should pay close attention to the Homeland Security Department’s growing surveillance apparatus, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes. Donate your kidney to a stranger, argues German Lopez, a former writer for this newsletter. He said it has been the most fulfilling experience of his life. The Times Sale ends soon: Expand your knowledge with our experts. Take advantage of our best offer and gain understanding and insight in every area of life. Just $1 a week for your first year of unlimited access to news, culture, cooking and more. MORNING READS Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times Warrior dance: High school teams in Utah practice a distinct form of competitive dance that has roots in military drills. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the economy. A bass player: Billy Bass Nelson turned a job sweeping floors for George Clinton into a gig as the first bassist for Clinton’s groundbreaking band, Funkadelic. He died at 75. TODAY’S NUMBER 20 — That is the number of times this century that Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog in Western Pennsylvania who traditionally “predicts” the weather, has foretold cold weather for the six weeks following Feb. 2. He has forecast an early spring just seven times during that period. SPORTS N.F.L.: Ten teams had head-coaching vacancies this hiring cycle and none has gone to a Black candidate. About 70 percent of the league’s players are African American, and only three of the 32 teams have a Black head coach. College basketball: Benjy Taylor, the Tuskegee University men’s coach, was handcuffed and escorted off the court after a loss to Morehouse when an exchange with a campus police officer escalated. RECIPE OF THE DAY Christopher Testani for The New York Times Here’s an absolute stunner of a Super Bowl snack tray: a sheet pan jammed with ham and cheese sliders. A buttery mix of mustard, dried onion, Worcestershire sauce, honey, poppy seeds and salt goes on top and brings a flavorful sheen to the sandwiches. You could make them with roast beef and Cheddar if you like (I’d add horseradish to the equation if so), or with turkey and provolone. Make sure to bake everything on parchment paper. It makes removal for cutting much easier. THE FARAGO FIVE Clockwise from left: Getty Museum; Fowler Museum; the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens Our art critic Jason Farago selected his five favorite pieces of art in Los Angeles. It’s a thrilling list, introducing us to a delicate bronze bust of Eros in disguise at the Getty and to a huge mural portrait of the L.A. artist Ed Ruscha on the wall of a building in the Arts District. There’s also a visit to the Hollywood Forever cemetery, where Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, lies interred alongside countless other celebrities, politicians, musicians and the occasional mobster. Engraved on his headstone: “That’s All Folks.” More on culture All-day cafes have surged in popularity since the ebb of the pandemic as customers look for in-person contact and restaurateurs seek more revenue. Brett Anderson, who covers the restaurant scene, charted their rise. “People can’t afford to go out all the time, but they can probably afford to grab a breakfast sandwich a couple of times a week,” one owner told him. Late night hosts joked about the Epstein files — and Elon Musk's request to party on Epstein’s private island. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Listen to the best emergency weather radios recommended by the go-bag-toting meteorologists at Wirecutter. (I do, often. They provide a soothing soundtrack even if you haven’t lost power.) Make new friends with this advice experts swear by. Prepare for a bracing week of television: the Olympics, a new season of “Below Deck Down Under,” the Season 3 finale of “The Lincoln Lawyer” and, of course, the Super Bowl on Sunday. Kick back! GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was epiphany. 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 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 February 5 Author Members Posted February 5 February 4, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. Penny, a Doberman pinscher, won the Westminster Dog Show last night — the first of her breed to receive the best in show honor since 1989. (See pictures from the show here.) And peace talks among the U.S., Russia and Ukraine are taking place today in the U.A.E. There’s more news below. I’m going to start today, though, at the very bottom of the world. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The melting continent Two days after Christmas, the Times journalists Raymond Zhong and Chang W. Lee set sail from Christchurch, New Zealand, on a research vessel bound for Antarctica. They’ve been there ever since, traveling with an international team of scientists on a high-stakes expedition to study the continent’s most unstable glacier. They’ve sent back gripping dispatches (that’s Ray’s job) and amazing images (Chang captures those). Their work documents the scientists’ research and lives, as well as the austere, beautiful and sometimes terrifying vistas around them. Thwaites, the glacier the scientists are studying, is a mass of ice that’s roughly the size of Florida. The research is meant to help us understand how long it will be before it melts away, lifting sea levels around the world. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Reporters from The Times have covered Antarctica for the better part of a century, and not from afar. (That’s my job.) Russell Owen was on the continent for 14 months in the late 1920s, writing almost daily about a milestone expedition led by Richard E. Byrd, then a U.S. Navy commander. Later trips by Times reporters, most recently in 2016, brought our readers stories of discovery and science on and in the ice. Ray and Chang have it pretty good, Ray told me yesterday when we caught up on a video call from the ship: good food, warm bunks, strong internet, an easy commute to work. Still, he said, it’s Antarctica. Things go wrong. Over the weekend, Ray reported, the expedition suffered a significant setback when instruments the scientists were lowering down a half-mile hole in the glacier got stuck and then froze over. The idea had been to moor them in the sea below the glacier to monitor the warming water that’s causing the glacier to slough ice and disappear. It was a gutting moment for the crew, Ray told me yesterday. As he wrote, “A project almost a decade in the making had crumbled at the final stage.” Chang W. Lee/The New York Times But it’s not as if the expedition has been a failure. The scientists bounced back quickly, and returned to work on the ship, Ray said. Disappointment often accompanies discovery, they know. It was never a certainty that the scientists would get any data at all, given the vicissitudes of weather and the ice itself. “They know what they signed up for,” Ray said. And they’ve gotten plenty of data, with more on the way before they depart this weekend. The scientists have flown helicopters equipped with radar antennas that have allowed them to find huge cracks in the ice and to map where and how the ice is breaking apart. They’ve tagged seals with sensors that essentially deputize the animals — they’ll collect data on their deep ocean dives that will help scientists better understand the water’s warming currents. They’ve placed instruments in ice rifts. And, Ray said, they’ll be back to learn more when they can. Once you’ve experienced the majesty of Antarctica, it’s hard to let it go. “You get the bug,” he said. Has he? Ray laughed. “Oh, yeah.” Chang W. Lee/The New York Times You can read more about the expedition here. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. THE LATEST NEWS International In the Donbas region. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Polls show that more Ukrainians are considering the once unthinkable: surrendering land in exchange for peace. A U.S. fighter jet shot down an Iranian drone that the American military said had aggressively approached an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. Spain’s prime minister announced plans to bar children under 16 from using social media, following Australia’s lead. Other countries are also considering restrictions. Immigration Two new polls show that most Republicans still support President Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics. Two brothers of Renee Good addressed lawmakers on Capitol Hill about their sister’s killing by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. One described her as “unapologetically hopeful.” For children in Minnesota, immigration raids are fracturing their communities and sense of security. Do ICE agents need a warrant to enter someone’s home? In the video below, Hamed Aleaziz, an immigration reporter, explains how the agency has broadened its own power. The New York Times More on Politics Congress passed, and Trump signed, a bill to reopen parts of the federal government, kicking off what are likely to be difficult negotiations over the scope of the administration’s ICE crackdowns. Trump doubled down on his extraordinary call for the Republican Party to “nationalize” voting in the United States. Trump met privately with Colombia’s president at the White House. The two leaders had verbally attacked each other for months, but Trump told reporters after the meeting they “got along very well.” Political scientists are using the term “neoroyalism” to describe Trump’s approach to governing, which they say is based on personal ties rather than national interest. Trump’s abrupt two-year closure of the Kennedy Center has rattled the institution’s employees, performers and subscribers. The president released new renderings of his White House ballroom and emphasized that it would not be taller than the Executive Mansion. Journalists Trump berated the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins in the Oval Office yesterday, calling her “the worst reporter” and scolding her for not smiling. Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who was arrested after covering a protest in Minnesota, told an audience in New York last night that he was not a protester but would defend free speech. Gender-Affirming Care A plastic surgeons’ group recommended delaying gender-affirming procedures until age 19, in contrast to the positions taken by most major U.S. medical associations. A woman won the first malpractice verdict against providers of gender-affirming care for minors. She said a double mastectomy she received as a teenager had left her disfigured. Business Walmart is now worth more than $1 trillion. It joins a small club of companies, including tech giants like Apple and Microsoft. Disney’s next C.E.O. will be Josh D’Amaro, a company veteran who recently ran its theme parks. Other Big Stories Days after the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of the “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie, the police said they were investigating it as a possible kidnapping. Guthrie withdrew from NBC’s Olympics coverage as the search continues. The ex-husband of Jill Biden was arrested and charged with murder in the death of his wife, the police said. OPINIONS The New York Times Laughter is fundamental to how babies learn about the world, writes Gina Mireault, a developmental psychologist. Here is a column by Jamelle Bouie on what happens when a president will not find common ground. The Times Sale ends soon: Expand your knowledge with our experts. Take advantage of our best offer and gain understanding and insight in every area of life. Just $1 a week for your first year of unlimited access to news, culture, cooking and more. MORNING READS Amir Hamja; Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times Brushing, panting, licking: See photos from backstage at the Westminster Dog Show, where the dogs could let down their fur before taking to the ring. A closer look: Researchers are doing virtual autopsies on mummies using high-resolution CT scans and 3-D printers. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about how to make and keep friends. The “Lobster Lady”: Virginia Oliver, a Maine folk hero, fished off the New England coast for more than 80 years. and continued almost until she died at 105. See photos of her life here. TODAY’S NUMBER 15 — That is the height, in feet, of a bronze gold-leafed statue of Trump that’s meant to be installed at his golf complex in Doral, Fla. It’s known as “Don Colossus.” SPORTS Olympics: Lindsey Vonn, the U.S. Alpine skiing star, said she would try to compete at the Milan-Cortina Olympics despite tearing her A.C.L. during a World Cup race in Switzerland last week. N.F.L.: Robert Kraft, who has owned the New England Patriots during their six Super Bowl wins, will not be selected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s 2026 class, a league source says. RECIPE OF THE DAY Andrew Bui for The New York Times. Frozen dumplings — like frozen rice cakes, frozen crinkle-cut Nathan’s fries and frozen homemade lobster stock — are an invaluable asset for weeknight cooking. Hetty Lui McKinnon’s new recipe gives them a Cantonese salt-and-pepper treatment usually reserved for seafood and stir-fries them with green beans. If you’re eating the dish with rice (I am), make sure to get it going before you start cooking the potstickers. The work goes fast. MISS PIGGY’S WORLD Molly Matalon for The New York Times A new single-episode edition of “The Muppet Show” premieres today on Disney+ and ABC. James Poniewozik, our television critic, has a rave: “There’s no newfangled hook, no contrived rationalization to bring the characters up to date,” he writes. “There are songs and slapstick and jokes, and nobody, blessedly, stayed up too late thinking about the reasons why. (Because Muppets, that’s why.)” In advance of watching it, catch up with Miss Piggy (and Eric Jacobson, the puppeteer who plays her). The glamorous sow is having a moment. More on culture A.O. Scott, a critic for our Book Review, took on a surprising assignment: He gave a close read of a federal judge’s fanged and witty decision that challenged the Trump administration’s theory of executive power and freed a 5-year-old boy. It’s an example of the role literary critics play in society, using plain language and keen insight to help the rest of us understand texts that otherwise might be left overlooked or misunderstood. Please read it. “Is the golden era of Jewish comedy coming to an end?” That’s the question our comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, took up this week. His conclusion: Not so fast. Late night hosts joked about the alternative Super Bowl halftime show. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Read “Good People,” by Patmeena Sabit. The novelist Tommy Orange, who knows a thing or two about quality writing, reviewed it for The Times. He calls the novel “a haunting, beautifully controlled exploration of what happens when the life you have built is dismantled by the very people you hoped would call you a friend.” Start a new fitness routine with these tips for beginners. Warm yourself stylishly with the best electric blankets tested by the plugged-in sleep experts at Wirecutter. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was dramatic. 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 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 February 6 Author Members Posted February 6 February 5, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. Savannah Guthrie, a host of the “Today” show, said in an emotional video last night that she and her siblings were ready to listen to ransom offers from whoever might have abducted her mother, but that the family would first need proof that she is alive. “We need to know, without a doubt,” she said. Read more about the case. And President Trump spoke to Xi Jinping on the phone for almost two hours yesterday. Taiwan was front and center. We have more news below. I’m going to start today, though, with the Epstein files. Jon Elswick/Associated Press Fresh revelations The Justice Department has an online Epstein Library. If you’re 18 or older and not a robot, you can use it to search many millions of pages of documents that detail the relationships that Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy convicted sex offender who killed himself in 2019, had with his powerful friends. The files, a large tranche of which were released last week, have led to embarrassment for some of those friends — and in some cases to a dousing of their careers. Last night, Brad Karp, the longtime chairman of Paul Weiss, one of the nation’s top corporate law firms, resigned after correspondence between him and Epstein emerged in the files. On Monday, Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the United States, resigned his seat in the House of Lords as the Metropolitan Police in London announced an investigation into his relationship with Epstein. A top official in Slovakia also appeared in the files, and also resigned. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, moved out of his stately royal home this week, his departure apparently hastened by revelations in the newest files. “I have a friend I think you might enjoy having dinner with,” Epstein wrote to Andrew in 2010. In a later email, Epstein added that the friend was 26, Russian, clever, beautiful and trustworthy. The prince responded that he would be “delighted” to meet her. The N.F.L. said it was going to look into the ties the New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch had with Epstein, after crude email exchanges between the men appeared in the documents. And yesterday, a department chair at the School of Visual Arts in New York stepped down after appearing in the new batch. The Epstein files are a lot, and that’s before we get to Trump’s appearances in them. They present such a sprawling, sordid, sometimes inchoate scandal that it can be difficult to understand exactly what they tell us, except that the guy had a lot of powerful friends. He used them for various reasons, and they used him for their own. Some of it was illegal. Some of it was ick. Some of it was quotidian (my name appears a few times because Epstein subscribed to various Times newsletters). And this week it’s all people want to talk about. Katrin Bennhold, who writes our excellent global newsletter The World, is one of them. She called Matthew Goldstein, a Times reporter who has covered the story since Epstein’s indictment and arrest in 2019, to talk about the case. Here are some excerpts from their conversation. What have we learned? Katrin: One thing I’ve been trying to understand is, why did all these powerful and rich people want to hang out with Epstein? Matthew: I think it speaks to how elite society works around the globe. It reveals the way that money, no matter how it’s gained, brings people attention, which brings more money and more attention, and generates this vast network of connections — even for someone like Epstein. So people saw that he gathered powerful people around him and wanted to be part of it, and that way the circle became bigger. But he was a publicly known and officially registered sex offender since 2008! Yes, and in that way it’s also revealing of how some people in elite society viewed women. There was very much a class aspect to this. A lot of the young girls came from broken homes and poor backgrounds. Some of them had been abused in their own families. And they were viewed, basically, as objects, if not to be sexually used, then to just be around, almost like furniture. They were viewed as disposable people. For many, the Epstein story has become a Trump story. How much of a risk is this story for the president? In a way, Trump did that to himself. His involvement with Epstein was no secret. It was known when he ran for president the first time in 2016. If it had just been about his closeness to Epstein, it would have been embarrassing, but the story probably would have faded. Trump made himself the story by promising the MAGA base that it would have full transparency about Epstein, but then sort of doing a fakeout. His administration made a big deal about having the Epstein client list, but then put out information that had already been largely in the public domain. Which made a lot of people think he’s hiding something. Yes, and that has created political problems for him. In the new batch of files, we found references to Trump that included some unverified claims, as well as documents that were already public. But from my perspective, I don’t see this story as primarily about Trump. It’s about this world of men in elite society and their treatment of young women. The latest Melinda French Gates said she felt “unbelievable sadness” over emails from the Epstein files claiming that her ex-husband, Bill Gates, engaged in extramarital sex. In another email, Epstein referenced Gates requesting that he delete emails regarding a sexually transmitted infection, and asked for antibiotics to “surreptitiously give to Melinda.” A former British duchess called Epstein the “brother I always wished for.” Norway’s future queen called him “my crazy friend.” See which royals kept Epstein close. Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to testify in the House’s investigation into the Epstein files. It’s the first time a former president has ever been compelled to testify before Congress under subpoena. Epstein helped Woody Allen’s daughter get into Bard College, emails show. THE LATEST NEWS Politics In Minneapolis last month. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times Trump said yesterday that he personally ordered the withdrawal of 700 law enforcement officers from Minnesota. That would leave about 2,000 in the state. The Supreme Court cleared the way for California to use a new congressional map designed to help Democrats in this year’s midterm elections. A man who tried to assassinate Trump at one of his Florida golf courses in 2024 was sentenced to life in prison. Fulton County, Ga., demanded that the F.B.I. return the 2020 ballots and election materials that agents seized last week. International The last nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired this morning. For the first time since 1972, the countries have no limits on the size of their arsenals. In Iran, the authorities are making mass arrests and hunting down doctors who treated people during last month’s anti-government protests At least 167 people were killed by gunmen in attacks on two villages in Nigeria, according to the Nigerian branch of the Red Cross. Health Care The spending bill passed by Congress includes an effort to lower drug prices. Another medical group, the American Medical Association, endorsed restrictions on gender-related surgeries for minors. Business In Syria. Ghaith Alsayed/Associated Press Chevron signed an agreement with Syria to explore developing the country’s first offshore oil and gas field Google announced a jump in profits after its A.I. system, Gemini, boosted YouTube viewership and increased search traffic. Silver is so pricey that Pandora, the world’s largest jeweler, is switching to platinum. Other Big Stories Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times The Washington Post laid off more than 300 of its roughly 800 journalists. The cuts decimate the paper’s local, international and sports coverage. Read the story of one journalist who worked there for 60 years and was affected, and listen to “The Daily” about the layoffs. University administrators and state officials are formally surveilling classrooms, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain. MANO A MANO Who gets to regulate social media? That’s a question the U.S. and Europe have been wrestling over for months. Washington says that the U.S.-based tech companies behind these platforms should be spared from regulatory scrutiny. Europe disagrees, and this week it took action. On Tuesday, the French authorities raided the Paris premises of Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, over allegations that it helped distribute child sex images. Almost simultaneously, the Spanish government vowed to ban social media for children under 16 and to make tech executives criminally liable for illicit content on their platforms. Hours later, congressional Republicans hit back, accusing Europe of weaponizing regulations to harm American free speech. Separately, Musk called the Spanish prime minister “a tyrant and traitor.” OPINIONS Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, created a lot of drama when she told Vanity Fair that Trump had an “alcoholic’s personality.” Chris Whipple, the journalist behind the story, explains why she talked to him. In The Conversation, Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens discuss how Trump brings out the worst in everyone. Introducing Crossplay Go word to word in our first 2-player game. Spell. Score. Outsmart your opponent. Download app MORNING READS In upstate New York. James Adolf A role model for dying: Brian Cahill felt great — until his cancer diagnosis. He’s making the most of the time he has left. “Othello” in Shanghai: In China, artists are required to show “love for the party” and commit to serving “the people and socialism.” How does Shakespeare fit in? Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was behind-the-scenes photos from the Westminster Dog Show. TODAY’S NUMBER $25 million — That is how much the U.S. paid, in gold, to acquire the Danish West Indies in 1917, in exchange for respecting Denmark’s control of Greenland, then a Danish colony. The three islands are now a part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. SPORTS Olympics: Less than five minutes into the first event of the Milan-Cortina Winter Games, a mixed doubles curling match, the lights went out. N.B.A.: A year after giving up Luka Dončić to get Anthony Davis, the Dallas Mavericks have traded Davis to the Washington Wizards. RECIPE OF THE DAY Con Poulos for The New York Times There’s a lot to recommend about Melissa Clark’s recipe for a lemony white bean soup with turkey and greens, not least its adaptability. If you smash some of the beans while the soup’s burbling along, allowing the broth to reduce around the starch, you’ll have a wonderful winter stew on your hands. If, on the other hand, you’d prefer a soup-soup, you can up the volume of stock and leave the beans whole. Good eats either way. AN UNQUIET ABSENCE Libby Howes performing with Spalding Gray in the play “Sakonnet Point” in 1975. Ken Kobland Helen Shaw, who recently joined The Times as a theater critic, looked into the life of Libby Howes, an actress who moved to New York in the 1970s. Howes became an imposing presence on the downtown stage before leaving the city abruptly in 1981 and disappearing. What happened to her remained a theater world mystery. Now, we have the story. More on culture No architectural retrospective in recent memory has left Michael Kimmelman, who writes about such things, feeling cheerier or more hopeful than the one that’s just gone up for Bruce Goff at the Art Institute of Chicago. Who? “You might well ask,” Michael writes, before introducing us to the forgotten modernist’s “mind-blowing assortment of flamboyant, bedazzling, occasionally campy” buildings. The pop star Tate McRae, a native of Alberta, is getting blowback from her fellow Canadians for name-checking the U.S. Olympic team in an ad for NBC. Late night hosts were skeptical of the $7 million opening weekend for “Melania.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Eric Helgas for The New York Times Improve your mood. Drink coffee. (Not too much.) Upgrade your bathroom or kitchen tiles with the help of these removable home décor tattoos tested by the commitment-averse microrenovators at Wirecutter. Light your room like a Swede — not cheap, but very cozy. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was divinely. 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 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 February 7 Author Members Posted February 7 February 6, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. Iranian and U.S. officials are meeting in Oman. It’s the first in-person negotiation since the United States and Iran were at war last June. And the Olympics open today in Italy. The Games are a show of global unity — in a moment when that seems very far away. The first medals will come tomorrow, but athletes are already curling, skating and skiing. Follow along here. But before we get to more news, let’s huddle up. Kirby Lee/Imagn Images, via Imagn Images Via Reuters Connect America’s game The Super Bowl is one of our great secular holidays, rivaled only by Thanksgiving for its place in the American imagination. More than 125 million people watched the game last year, either for the contest itself or for the halftime show and the advertising that breaks up the plays and quarters. Who’s playing? It’s the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots this year, not that a majority of the viewers are likely to care. (The Seahawks are favored to win, at least according to the giant digital billboard for a prediction-market site that’s outside my window in Times Square.) They just enjoy the spectacle, the wonder of a shared national experience, the thrill of not knowing what’s going to happen. Because anything can happen! In 2008, the New York Giants managed to squeak past the Patriots to win Super Bowl XLII, ruining their perfect season. Four years earlier, Justin Timberlake tore off a part of Janet Jackson’s costume during the halftime show, introducing the term “wardrobe malfunction” to the world. And remember Katy Perry’s Left Shark? The Super Bowl’s always magnetic, even if the peer-reviewed studies suggest the sport is not just dangerous but deadly. The ads George Clooney pitches Grubhub in one of two Super Bowl ads directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. But maybe you’re in it for the advertising, the chance to make like a client at Don Draper’s shop, giving thumbs up or down to pitches from the creative teams. Mike Hale, one of our television critics, takes measure of the Super Bowl ads every year, updating his ratings as the commercials arrive on our screens. (He’s tough. Clydesdales don’t move him at all.) Thus far, Mike’s positive on Emma Stone for Squarespace (a collaboration with the arty director Yorgos Lanthimos) and the Christian ad campaign “He Gets Us.” He’s less so on Adrien Brody for TurboTax — and the N.F.L. tight ends who gathered to suggest that getting screened for prostate cancer allows a man to relax … his tight end. (See Mike’s rankings here.) Halftime! Bad Bunny Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press Bad Bunny, fresh off his win for album of the year at last weekend’s Grammy Awards, is the headliner. An American citizen from Puerto Rico, he sings and raps primarily in Spanish. How you feel about that probably says something about your politics. It’s not just the Spanish. The rapper and singer decried the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown during the awards ceremony, angering many on the right. (President Trump called Bad Bunny a “terrible choice” for the halftime show and said he would not attend the game.) So however joyous his singing and dancing, his performance on Sunday will undoubtedly be, as my colleague Jennifer Medina put it, con política. To counter it, the conservative group Turning Point USA announced that it would stream an alternative halftime show, headlined by Kid Rock. “We plan to play great songs for folks who love America,” he said. But a whole lot of people are looking forward to Bad Bunny — not least the small community of Puerto Ricans who have played professional football. “The stage is bigger than the N.F.L. itself,” the retired offensive lineman Willie Colón told The Times. “The stage is indicative to where we’re at right now.” The feast Mark Weinberg for The New York Times Whatever you’re watching at halftime, whatever team you’re rooting for before and after it, whatever ads you like or loathe, there’s no point in taking part in the Super Bowl game day on an empty stomach. The gang I used to run with at NYT Cooking has plenty of recipes for the day. But I’ll give you my menu and see if it sparks joy: oven-fried hot wings with blue cheese dressing; cheese enchiladas; a honking big platter of nachos; some crab and artichoke dip. The point, for me, is not so much to consume all that food as to make it for those who’ve come into my home to sit on the couch and watch the big screen. You don’t want them dourly munching on a bag of chips. You want them laughing and prop-betting and discussing all that’s happening around them, good and bad. Feed everyone heartily, and watch the human connection flourish. That’s a good goal for all Americans this weekend, however you feel about the state of the world. See you on Sunday. THE LATEST NEWS Iran Iran is at work on its missile and nuclear sites, satellite images show. Several ballistic missile facilities were damaged in strikes last year. The country’s weapons program will likely be the subject of talks between the U.S. and Iran today. Immigration Many immigrants arrested in Minnesota are being sent to a desolate detention camp in West Texas, and then forced to find their own way home. Senate Democrats are demanding major changes to ICE operations, and Republicans are digging in against them. Lawmakers left Washington for the weekend without making progress. Politics The Capitol on Thursday. Eric Lee for The New York Times The Trump administration finalized a new policy to strip job protections from up to 50,000 federal workers. It makes it easier for Trump to remove or discipline them — going beyond the roughly 4,000 political appointees the president generally controls. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asserted that the keto diet could cure schizophrenia. Experts say the claim is unfounded. Russia-Ukraine War Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. ended the latest round of peace talks without making much progress toward ending the war. Elon Musk’s satellite service, Starlink, blocked Russian troops’ internet access at Ukraine’s request. Russian military bloggers said troops were experiencing internet outages that hampered frontline communications. The last major nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia has expired. In the video below, David Sanger, a national security correspondent, explains how we got here. Click to watch. The New York Times Business and Economy Argentina and the U.S. signed a sweeping trade deal. Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, wants to turn the country into a leader in electric vehicles. He proposed billions of dollars in incentives and tax breaks to make that happen. Bitcoin dropped sharply in the past week. It’s now worth about half of what it was in October, at its peak. A jury in Phoenix ordered Uber to pay $8.5 million to a woman who said one of its drivers had raped her. There are thousands of similar cases around the U.S. International The crown of Empress Eugénie. Thomas Clot/Musée du Louvre The Louvre thieves dropped a priceless crown. See what it once looked like. In Japan, a pregnant parliamentary candidate is upending an election and challenging gender expectations in the country. OPINIONS Canadians have been mad at America for a while. As Trump’s threatens territorial expansion, that rage is spreading across the West, writes Stephen Marche. Carlos Lozada wrote an elegy for The Washington Post he loved. Introducing Crossplay Go word to word in our first 2-player game. Spell. Score. Outsmart your opponent. Download app MORNING READS Brock McGillis and Matthew Ward. Steph Martyniuk for The New York Times Heated? Yes. Rivalry? No: A gay former professional hockey player married a sales associate at Cartier in Toronto after a decade of ups and downs. Click! A tea party: A playtime experiment showed scientists that apes have the capacity for make-believe. Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about Swedish lighting. TODAY’S NUMBER 1 x 10⁻¹² — That is one-trillionth. Laboratories that conduct sports doping tests have instruments that can detect substances down to that fraction of a gram, known as a picogram. WINTER OLYMPICS Jessie Diggins of the U.S. training for cross-country skiing. Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters Sign up to our Games Briefing to follow the latest from the Olympics, which will run for the next few weeks. The opening ceremony for the Milan-Cortina Games is today. The Times spoke with the man who designed it. Safety: Guarding the Games is one of the largest security operations in Italian history, involving 6,000 security personnel, robots and surveillance drones. Cross-country skiing: Jessie Diggins is the best-ever American in the sport. The Times Magazine explains how she trains her body. Snowboarding: The American star Red Gerard failed to qualify for the Big Air finals. He blamed a wonky rule. Women’s Hockey: The match between Canada and Finland was postponed a week after a norovirus outbreak hit Finland’s roster. Meanwhile, the United States opened with a 5-1 win over the Czech Republic. CATHY AND HEATHCLIFF ❤️ In “Wuthering Heights.” Warner Bros. Did Emily Brontë write the greatest love story of all time? As a new film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” comes to the screen, our critic A.O. Scott tries to answer the question by taking a close look at a handful of sentences in the 1847 novel. “No picture will ever quite match the book’s thousands of feverish, hungry, astonishing words,” he writes. Read one intense passage. More on culture In Agra, India. Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times In a new film, Bollywood has embraced a Taj Mahal conspiracy theory. A one-off episode in “Wonder Man,” the new Marvel series on Disney+, provides an intriguing alternative to the company’s usual fare of goofy C.G.I. action sequences, writes Maya Phillips, a Times culture critic: “The show’s pointedly meta, more adult sense of humor grounds the action in our world, our Hollywood, our celebrities.” After nearly a century of airport, pharmacy and supermarket sales, the cheap mass market paperback is nearing extinction, reports Elizabeth Harris, who covers the book industry. Sales have been on the decline for years as readers have turned to the larger format known as trade paperbacks, and to audiobooks and e-books. Late night hosts joked about Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS In “Bridgerton.” Netflix Watch “Bridgerton” tackle the orgasm gap. Sex therapists are happy about it. Dry yourself after a shower with this luxuriously soft and thick towel recommended by the scrupulous bathroom attendants at Wirecutter. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was midmonth. 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 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 February 8 Author Members Posted February 8 February 7, 2026 Good morning. Behind the scenes at the Westminster dog show, the entrants were affectionate. Or at least they acted like it. María Jesús Contreras Vanity fair By Melissa Kirsch I was advised before entering the stalls of competitors at the Westminster dog show that I should think of the dogs as celebrities. Some are friendly and ready to socialize, like Habiba, a Sloughi who somehow managed to still be charming after 12 hours in a crate from Los Angeles to New York City. Others, I was told, are standoffish, and they’ll just give you their backs, don’t press it. I expected to encounter some haughty poodles who wouldn’t give me the time of day, but even the ones with the fussiest looking hairdos were warm and welcoming. Twinkle, a Brussels Griffon, gamely met my gaze as members of her entourage lifted each of her little limbs, one by one, and placed them back down. “She’s doing her yoga,” the attendant explained. A dachshund mid-neck trim, a Norwich terrier undergoing a sponge bath, an Old English sheepdog who had some serious rolling around to do: Not a one declined to sniff my hand. My mind was on “Best in Show,” Christopher Guest’s 2000 mockumentary about the handlers and dogs of a Westminster-esque competition. Clueless as to the particulars of dog shows, I had assumed the movie was a complete fiction. But wandering the stalls of dogs at the Javits Center this week, I felt almost as if I’d wandered onto the film’s set: the blow-drying and coat-spraying, the handlers in sparkly blazers, the seriousness with which the humans took the proceedings all appeared pretty accurate. “The first time I watched it, I was highly insulted,” this year’s best in show judge, David Fitzpatrick, told The Times. “I was like, ‘This is just awful, these people making fun of us.’ Then I watched it again and I started thinking, ‘Oh my God, they really have some of us pegged.’” The movie starred Catherine O’Hara, who died last week at 71, as Cookie Fleck, the owner of the terrier Winky who (spoiler alert) wins the title. At the final round of competition on Tuesday, a video tribute to O’Hara was shown. As daffy and over-the-top as Cookie and the rest of the characters are in “Best in Show,” watching the movie, one cannot help but be moved by the dogs, abiding valiantly not only through their fictional owners’ shenanigans, but also through the larger charade that is filmmaking. They have no idea they’re in a Hollywood production, just as the dogs at Westminster are clueless to the stakes of the competition. In all cases, they obediently go along with our human choreography, playing the role in which they’ve permanently been cast: Man’s Best Friend. It was tempting, as I encountered one genial canine after another, to draw a contrast between the mounds of snow banking Midtown Manhattan and the feeling of warmth inside the convention center, where one could pat Jet the Puli’s extraordinary corded coat and then be greeted cheerily by Mulder the Basenji, fresh off his award of merit. “There’s so much love in here!” I found myself thinking, and then wondered how much I was projecting. I, a human, perceived Greta, a piebald dachshund, to be showing me love because she lifted her glorious snoot to look at me as I touched her head. But Greta was having her dog emotions, whatever they were, if they were, and who knows how much she cared for the cooing and ogling of this admirer, never mind the rest of the besotted throngs. I started to feel self-conscious. After several hours of meeting and greeting, of reflexively pitching my voice into marshmallow register as I chatted with entrants, I asked a man and a woman ministering to a particularly adorable 3-year-old beagle named Stitch, “When you work with dogs, do you learn not to speak in baby talk to dogs all the time?” At this, Stitch stood up on his hind legs as if to show me he was no baby and I could have addressed my question to him. “I never spoke baby talk to my daughter,” the woman said, with the weariness of someone who had been listening to people babble at dogs all day and was just about done. “But it just comes naturally when you see something cute, right?” I asked, a little defensive, knowing that I was helpless to act dignified around these creatures. “They teach you in the behavior world as well, just speak to them normally,” the man said. He watched me melt as I noticed how big Stitch’s paws were compared with his body. “But everybody breaks the rules,” he said charitably. I like to believe Stitch nodded in agreement. And for more on dogs … Our Styles desk chose seven of the most unforgettable dogs from Westminster. If you want even more dog show photos, you can get your fill here. Here’s grooming and beauty advice from the handlers who keep show dogs looking pristine. A 10-year-old terrier mutt named Tintin, averse to flying, crossed the ocean on the Queen Mary 2. THE LATEST NEWS Politics President Trump in the Oval Office this week. Kenny Holston/The New York Times President Trump shared a racist video on social media that depicted the Obamas as apes. After members of both parties criticized the post, he deleted it. Trump administration officials offered to unfreeze funding for a major rail project if Senator Chuck Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station and Dulles Airport after Trump. Work on that rail project, a tunnel under the Hudson River, halted yesterday. But a judge later ordered the administration to unlock the funding as a case proceeds through the courts. The government is seeking to expedite the deportation of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy in a blue bunny hat who was detained in Minnesota. Other Big Stories A top Russian general involved in intelligence gathering for the Ukraine war was shot in Moscow. Several military leaders have been attacked in Russia since the war began. China’s highest court overturned the death sentence of a Canadian man who had been convicted of drug smuggling. The case had been a source of diplomatic friction between the two countries. The stock market had its best day since May, and the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 50,000 points for the first time. The authorities are reviewing a new message in the kidnapping case of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of the “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, as they expand their investigation beyond Arizona. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV A scene from “Sirat.” Neon “Sirat,” nominated for the best international film Oscar, follows a man searching for his lost daughter amid a group of ravers in the Sahara. Our critic calls it beguiling, flawed, bonkers and deeply moving. The actor Harry Melling, who played Harry Potter’s cruel cousin Dudley Dursley, bares all in the queer romance “Pillion.” Theater A swift, stunning production of “King Lear” at La MaMa in Manhattan puts the entire cast in the title role. “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” will end its Broadway run this summer, thought it continues to be performed in cities around the globe. More Culture Guarionex Rodriguez for The New York Times The designer for the New York Botanical Garden’s Orchid Show goes by Mr. Flower Fantastic and doesn’t show his face. He’s letting his art speak for itself. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is returning to that name, after a brief and ill-fated attempt to rebrand as the Philadelphia Art Museum. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a summer tradition on the National Mall, will vacate its usual spot this year for Trump’s Great American State Fair. Introducing Crossplay Go word to word in our first 2-player game. Spell. Score. Outsmart your opponent. Download app CULTURE CALENDAR 🎬 “Wuthering Heights” (Friday): There have been more than a dozen filmed versions of Emily Brontë’s canon gothic romance, and the results have been uneven. “When it comes to screen adaptations,” The Times wrote in 2012, “the novel may be the most misunderstood book of all time.” Here’s another try, this time from Emerald Fennell, the director of “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn.” Her aesthetic is apparent in the lusty, saturated trailer, and in the thumping soundtrack by Charli XCX. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi star as the star-crossed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff. RECIPE OF THE WEEK Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. By Melissa Clark Spinach, artichoke and yogurt dip The Super Bowl is Sunday, which is the perfect excuse to whip up a big bowl of dip — whether you watch the game or not. Ashley Lonsdale’s light, tangy spinach, artichoke and yogurt dip is packed with enough vegetables and protein to make it satisfying enough for dinner, especially if you serve it with whole grain crackers or sliced baguette and even more vegetables. It’s best prepared ahead so the flavors have time to mingle. Make it today and it’ll be ready for kickoff. REAL ESTATE Marisa Lalli with her dog, Roxie. Graham Dickie for The New York Times The Hunt: Looking to fulfill her father’s wish that she find a permanent home, she sought a one-bedroom close to Central Park. Which did she choose? Play our game. What you get for $530,000: A 2020 remodel in Columbus, Ohio, a 1935 farmhouse in Mentone, Ala., and a 1930 bungalow in Houston. Living small: How an unfinished basement in a Washington, D.C., rowhouse transformed into the most attractive space in the home. LIVING Jim and Rachel Van Eerden’s cabin in Stokesdale, N.C. Sebastian Siadecki for The New York Times Transcendental living: Some people are imitating Henry David Thoreau and building full-scale replicas of his Walden cabin. Seeking stability: After a divorce, some families let the children stay in the family home full-time while the parents rotate in and out, a practice known as “bird nesting”; experts say there are pros and cons. Drug discounts: A new government website, TrumpRx.gov, aims to help Americans to buy cheaper medications. Here is a guide to using it. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER The best Valentine’s Day gifts Over the course of my 13-year relationship, Valentine’s Day gifts from my partner have included diamond earrings, charging cables, a faux shearling earflap cap and nothing at all. Which is all to say that love (or at least the kind I’ve experienced) goes through many stages. As Wirecutter’s gifts editor, I informally polled a handful of couples on their Feb. 14 plans, and they agreed: A real Valentine’s Day gift — the best Valentine’s Day gift — isn’t the sexiest, the priciest or even the most unique. It’s the one that meets the moment of your love, wherever that may be today. And should you need some inspiration in the 11th hour, these 32 last-minute gifts feel anything but. — Hannah Morrill SUPER BOWL LX Levi’s Stadium in California, where the Super Bowl will be played. Max A. Cherney/Reuters New England Patriots. Seattle Seahawks. If you’ve been following the playoffs, you probably know a lot about these teams by now. If you haven’t — if you’re one of the many people tuning into their first N.F.L. game of the season — here’s a quick guide. The Seahawks: They’re widely regarded as the most complete team in football. That starts with the defense, which allowed the fewest points in the league this season. Head coach Mike Macdonald is the primary defensive play-caller, which is unusual — so unusual, in fact, that he would be the first such coach to win a Super Bowl. The offense is really good, too. Wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba led the league in receiving yards, and he’s got the confidence to match. “Any limitation that is put on me is not true,” he said recently. “I honestly feel like I can do almost everything.” The Patriots: Drake Maye will be 23 years and 162 days old tomorrow — the second-youngest quarterback to start a Super Bowl. His offense was great this year, thanks in part to his fellow 23-year-old Kayshon Boutte, a receiver who specializes in big plays (including the most cinematic catch of the playoffs). But Maye has cooled off a bit in the postseason, and the Patriots’ defense has carried the team. To win this weekend, the team will need Maye to turn back into Superman, The Athletic’s Chad Graff writes. Sunday at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on NBC NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was menacing. 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 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 February 9 Author Members Posted February 9 February 8, 2026 Good morning. It can be hard to talk with aging parents about their health, but it’s important. Today, some advice to make those conversations easier. Maria Hergueta The talk By Simar Bajaj Americans are living longer. But many adult children don’t know what’s going on with their parents’ health — until after a fall, an ambulance ride or a hospital stay. This lack of communication hurts everyone, said Dr. Louise Aronson, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco. In an emergency, adult children may be overwhelmed about what to do and may clash with siblings. For parents, silence can mean that their wishes aren’t understood and that their children are needlessly put through the stress of guessing. To avoid these scenarios, we asked experts what you need to learn about your aging parents before a crisis. And they identified three clear steps you can take to make sure you’re prepared. 1. Ask about their health. The first step is having a difficult conversation with your parents. In an emergency, a doctor may have only a snapshot of your parents’ health. So it’s important for you to get a clear picture. If you understand their routines and medical history, you can help the health care team treat your parents more effectively. Start with the everyday stuff — what does a normal week look like — and then ease into questions about mobility and memory changes. Sometimes, it’s best to circle around the issue. Ask what they avoid now — taking the stairs, going on long walks, driving at night — and what’s gotten harder, like managing bills or keeping track of appointments, said Dr. Sabrina Taldone, the chief of general internal medicine at University of Miami Health. And explain why you’re asking: You’re not prying, you just want to be able to help in the future. It’s also important to build a simple “in case of emergency” list: medications, physician names, allergies and prior surgeries. Include your parents’ pharmacy name and number so that, if needed, a doctor can verify what’s been filled. Save this list on your phone. Doctors say it’s important to keep a paper copy in your wallet, too, in case you run out of battery in an emergency. 2. Discuss their living environment. The second step is to ensure their home is still safe for them. Parents often end up in hospitals or care facilities because their abilities no longer align with their house, Dr. Aronson said. So, talk to your parents about ways to extend their independence, like clearing clutter, removing loose rugs, improving lighting or adding handrails. A fall can set off a chain reaction — hospitalization, rehab, a nursing home — so frame these tweaks as a way for your parents to stay in control. It’s also worth discussing where your parents could live if they ever needed to move. Would they want to stay in their home at any cost? Would they be open to downsizing? Would they consider moving in with family or trying assisted living? Having these conversations early can help maximize your parents’ options, since facility waiting lists can be long, and some places can’t accommodate people with more serious illnesses. 3. Make a plan. Finally, prepare for a medical emergency. While you can’t rehearse every possible decision, you can be clear about who will speak for your parents if they are incapacitated and what they care about most. Ask your parents to designate a point person, and make sure everybody knows who it is. When families aren’t aligned or no one’s clearly in charge, messages can get muddled, and care can get delayed. This isn’t about picking a favorite; it’s about choosing the person best positioned to carry out your parents’ wishes, even under pressure. And that may not be you or one of your siblings. Just as important, talk to your parents about their goals and values. “In an emergency, you’re rushing through the decisions — it’s emotional,” said Dr. Namita Seth Mohta, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “This is a chance to reflect ahead of time.” Explore what brings your parents joy and meaning, what their biggest worries and their priorities for medical treatment are, and what they want to avoid. For example, a parent might want to maximize time spent at home, do everything possible to survive or avoid being kept alive by machines in the intensive care unit. (You can make this a group activity to avoid your parents’ feeling singled out.) It’s normal to want to avoid these conversations. “It feels like you’re putting them through something hard, but it’s avoiding something that is far, far worse,” Dr. Aronson said. THE LATEST NEWS Minnesota In Minnesota yesterday. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times At least 50 people were arrested yesterday after protests near a federal building outside Minneapolis. The top lawyer for ICE in Minnesota has left the agency, as a crush of litigation over the immigration crackdown in the state has overwhelmed the court system. Politics The White House’s decision to delete a racist social media post after bipartisan backlash shows that the president is not immune to the usual rules of politics. A fake post that appeared to claim President Trump deleted the racist video because it was offensive to animals spread widely online. A new group supporting Trump’s plans for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration is offering access to him and other perks to donors who give at least $1 million to the project. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, moved to lock down an intelligence intercept of a call between two foreign nationals that referred to someone close to Trump, according to a whistle-blower report. The Epstein Files Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, was in regular contact with Jeffrey Epstein while they were neighbors in Manhattan, the latest batch of Epstein files shows. The files directly contradict Lutnick’s claim that he “spent zero time” with Epstein after 2005. Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, played a substantial role in the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative, according to the latest batch of files. International In Kyiv. Alina Smutko/Reuters Ukraine asked Poland for emergency electricity assistance after Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure caused outages across Ukraine. Trump’s “Board of Peace” is scheduled to meet next week in Washington to discuss raising funds for Gaza’s reconstruction, according to officials. Other Big Stories Will Lewis stepped down as the C.E.O. and publisher of The Washington Post, days after widespread layoffs in the paper’s newsroom. Savannah Guthrie and her siblings released a video promising to pay for the release of their mother. A major online provider of obesity medication will stop selling a knockoff version of the Wegovy pill after regulators suggested that the product might be illegal. THE SUNDAY DEBATE Recent snowstorms have buried street-parked cars in snow. Should someone be allowed to call “dibs” or “savesies” on the parking spot they shoveled out after a blizzard? Yes. It is an unspoken rule that whoever shovels the parking spot owns it. “Move someone’s dibs marker and park in their spot? You’re asking for trouble,” Wes Bobek wrote on the website HouseKeepUp. No. Tradition or not, saving a parking spot is illegal. “Why can’t you shovel out a spot, help your neighbors shovel out more spaces and leave the street free?” Mary Wisniewski wrote for The Chicago Tribune. FROM OPINION Since the start of Trump’s second term, the Times editorial board has been tracking the erosion of American democracy. The crackdown on protests in Minnesota moved the needle. Last year, Elon Musk boasted of “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” The agency’s demise has heralded a dark shift in America’s values, writes Jeremy Konyndyk. Here is a column by David French on “The Testament of Ann Lee” and the upside of Christian fellowship. Introducing Crossplay Go word to word in our first 2-player game. Spell. Score. Outsmart your opponent. Download app MORNING READS Kara Coleen Quiz show: Some couples are adding trivia and scavenger hunts into their wedding receptions to keep guests entertained. Deep freeze: Unusual weather patterns have brought more snow to Florida than Salt Lake City this year. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about seven unforgettable dogs at the Westminster dog show. WINTER OLYMPICS Sign up to our Games Briefing to follow the latest from the Olympics, which will run for the next few weeks. Downhill skiing: Lindsey Vonn, skiing just over a week after tearing her A.C.L., crashed during a run and was airlifted off the course. Speedskating: Francesca Lollobrigida delivered Italy its first gold medal of the Games, and the day’s best moment: celebrating on the track with her young son. Figure skating: Ilia Malinin — a.k.a. the Quad God — wasn’t quite so otherworldly in the team event yesterday, but he helped the U.S. reach the final with a second-place finish in the short program. Hockey: The U.S. women’s team defeated Finland in a decisive 5-0 win. Snowboarding: Kira Kimura of Japan won the men’s Big Air competition. See his best trick, a switch backside 1980 weddle, broken down frame by frame. BOOK OF THE WEEK By Elisabeth Egan “Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose” by Jennifer Breheny Wallace: “Wallace’s book is mostly populated by ordinary people searching for meaning and connection in their lives,” wrote our critic in her review of “Mattering,” which explores the importance of feeling that we are valued and needed by others. In “Never Enough” (2023), Wallace kicked the tires on achievement culture; here, she shares the big and small ways in which families, friends and strangers work to build connections to one another and their communities. By turns earnest and lighthearted, this best-selling book contains a simple, necessary message about the importance of decency and kindness. More on books For our full review of two books on the primal desire to feel needed, go here. The mass market paperback is now an endangered species. Find out more here. THE INTERVIEW Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times By David Marchese This week’s subject for The Interview is the best-selling author Michael Pollan, whose forthcoming book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” is a highly personal and expansive survey of questions around human consciousness — what it is, what it’s for and what that all might mean for how we live. I could talk about consciousness all day, but often when I do talk about it with people, I can tell that they view thinking about consciousness as almost akin to navel gazing. Like, it’s interesting to think about, but really what difference does it make? What is your response to that? I’ve thought a lot about what good is it to think about consciousness, and I came to think that it’s more important than ever. Scientists are learning that more animals and creatures — going all the way down possibly to insects — are conscious. So that’s one interesting issue: We’re sharing consciousness with more creatures. And then the big threat is artificial intelligence and the effort to create a conscious A.I., which is going to be an enormous challenge to this question of what does it mean to be human. Is consciousness something that a machine can possess? Who are we? So I think we’re approaching this kind of Copernican moment of redefinition. Questions of consciousness, which are really questions about what makes us us, are important questions. But at the same time, they can lead into other questions like: Is there some stable “I” that exists or not? Sometimes thinking about those questions can be destabilizing. Is that just me? Do you have similar apprehensions? It can be destabilizing, absolutely. One of the reasons people are happy to be less conscious and fill their attention with distractions and drugs is because the mind can be a scary place to visit. We often want to be less aware of what’s going on. There are reasons people avoid going down these rabbit holes. It takes a willingness to risk something. I apologize if this seems like a woo-woo question, but do you think the absence of something like a stable “self” also means the absence of something like a soul? Do you believe in a soul? Well, if a soul is something that is indestructible and survives our death, no. But I can’t say anything about the afterlife with confidence. Consciousness has become our secular substitute for the soul; we talk about consciousness the way people in the 16th or 17th century talked about souls. So I think there is a hidden religiosity or spirituality in the whole conversation around consciousness. Somebody asked me recently, Do you think as people get older, they are more interested in consciousness? And I would say yes, and probably for that reason. Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Watch the Puppy Bowl, an annual marathon of doggy drool and cat cameos aimed to encourage pet adoption. Sleep better with these techniques Olympians follow. MEAL PLAN Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Liza Jernow. Chili doesn’t have a season, technically, but if it did, we’d be in the heart of it now. In her Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein recommends a vegetarian skillet chili from Melissa Clark, the “pantriest pantry recipe of them all” — a jumble of canned tomatoes, beans, garlic, onion and spices. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were propitiatory and topiary. Can you put eight historical events — including the first Winter Olympics, Thoreau’s move to Walden Pond and the creation of Miss Piggy — 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 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 February 10 Author Members Posted February 10 February 10, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The U.S. military blew up another boat in the Pacific Ocean that it claimed was carrying drugs, killing two people. The strikes have now claimed 130 lives. And a group of conservative activists has worked for more than a decade to stop all American government efforts to fight climate change. They’re “close to total victory,” one said. There’s more news below, including a look at the cognitive benefits of coffee. I’m going to start, though, with nuclear weapons. An atomic test in Nevada in 1955. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, via Associated Press The end of arms control I grew up in a world where the prospect of nuclear war seemed remote, if not impossible. My school didn’t run the duck-and-cover drills that haunted baby boomers. My punk-rock friends largely sneered at their older siblings’ recordings of the 1979 No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. None of us really understood the satire of “Dr. Strangelove.” The existential threat that hovered over our classrooms was AIDS. Then, last week, the United States and Russia allowed New START, their last nuclear arms control treaty, to die. For the first time in 50 years, the two nations do not have limits on the size or composition of their nuclear arsenals. Not only that, report my colleagues David Sanger and William Broad: The United States is considering deploying more nuclear weapons — and may even restart testing them. Trump unbound President Trump says he wants an “improved and modernized” agreement. But he hasn’t mentioned freezing the size of the American and Russian arsenals. The consequences for global security are myriad, and scary. For one thing, it leaves open the possibility of a new arms race, one that the United States, Russia and China have anticipated. For another, some U.S. allies already wonder if they can count on the protection of the U.S. as a nuclear deterrent. Some have begun to explore making their own nukes. Currently, just nine nations — Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the U.S. — command these weapons. Could others soon join them? Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Pool photo by Evgenia Novozhenina Amid that uncertainty comes the Trump administration’s plan to deploy more bombs and maybe test some. That would take the United States in the opposite direction from the greater and greater control of nuclear weaponry in place since Ronald Reagan was president. The nation has not conducted a nuclear test since 1992. The administration is already budgeting funds that would enable more warheads on the largest nuclear-armed submarines, David and Bill say. That puts enemies on notice, of course: A retaliatory strike by the U.S. could be bigger than ever. But it could also encourage other nations to do the same, threatening Trump’s desire to protect the nation with a “Golden Dome” to intercept missiles launched by its foes. The more targets there are, the harder it is to shoot them down. A new arms race? Last fall, Russia unveiled the Poseidon, an underwater drone that can cross an ocean to detonate a thermonuclear warhead. That could set off a radioactive tsunami and eliminate a coastal city. “There is nothing like this in the world in terms of the speed and the depth of the movement of this unmanned vehicle — and it is unlikely there ever will be,” Vladimir Putin said at the time. (He added that there were “no ways to intercept” it.) Russia is also trying to place a nuclear weapon in space, American officials said during the Biden administration, where it could vaporize fleets of American satellites. China, for its part, has tested a hypersonic missile that could follow a zigzag path and release a warhead that would be almost impossible to intercept. And it appears to have little interest in arms control until the size of its nuclear arsenal matches the ones controlled by Washington and Moscow, David and Bill report. American allies have a related worry: that Washington’s “nuclear umbrella” can’t be counted on to cover them. The prime minister of Poland suggested recently that the time had come for his country to explore nuclear options. And last month, when Trump was threatening to take over Greenland (remember that?), a leading newspaper in Sweden called for a Nordic nuclear arsenal. I’m glad not to be an eighth grader thinking about this before bed. IN ONE CHART *The government has appealed. Allison McCann/The New York Times Over the past year, federal immigration agents patrolling in U.S. cities and towns have shot 16 people. In many of these cases, the government is quick to blame the people who are shot. Those claims have fallen apart when the cases have gone to court, as Alexandra Berzon and Allison McCann detail in a new article. THE LATEST NEWS Immigration A federal judge struck down California’s law banning federal agents from wearing masks because it did not apply equally to all law enforcement. In Minnesota, many children from immigrant families are too afraid to attend school, which cuts them off from free breakfast and lunch programs. Some schools are sending volunteers to bring food to hungry families. Epstein Investigation Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime associate, refused to answer any questions during a closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee. Two congressmen, a Republican and a Democrat, reviewed unredacted Epstein files and criticized the government for obscuring the identities of six men who they believed were implicated in sex-trafficking charges. Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, is facing calls to resign over his decision to name an associate of Epstein’s as ambassador to the U.S. Health The Trump administration plans to rescind $600 million in public health funds from four Democratic-led states. Officials have recorded more than 700 cases of the measles in the U.S. since the start of the year, a vast majority of them in unvaccinated people. Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s director of Medicare and Medicaid Services, urged Americans to get vaccinated against measles. International In the West Bank. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times Israel’s government has made it easier for Jewish settlers to buy land in the West Bank, a possible violation of international law. The police and pro-Palestinian protesters clashed in Sydney, Australia, as the president of Israel visited the site of the Bondi Beach attack. Iranian authorities have detained at least seven prominent opposition figures as they crack down on dissent. Labor San Francisco teachers walked out, shuttering schools for tens of thousands of students, after nearly a year of contract talks failed to yield an agreement. Nurses in New York City reached a deal to end a monthlong strike at two major hospital systems. Nurses at a third system remain on strike. Other Big Stories In Triangle, Va. Caroline Gutman for The New York Times More than a dozen Buddhist monks have spent four months on a “Walk for Peace” from Texas to Washington, D.C., attracting crowds inspired by their journey. Savannah Guthrie posted a video asking the public to help find her mother, who has been missing for more than a week. “We are at an hour of desperation,” she said. Catherine O’Hara, the film and television actress best known for her roles in “Schitt’s Creek” and “Home Alone,” died of a pulmonary embolism with an underlying cause of rectal cancer, according to a death certificate. A major snow drought across the Western United States this winter is threatening water supplies and resulting in one of the worst ski seasons in decades. It has also forced the cancellation a dog sled race. BRAIN JUICE Amrita Chandradas for The New York Times If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpens your mind, you just might be right. A large new study shows evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea — as long as they’re caffeinated. Participants who drank two to three cups of coffee, or one to two cups of tea, daily for decades had a lower chance of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. The study didn’t find additional benefits for people who drank more, though — possibly because there’s a limit to how much caffeine our bodies can metabolize. OPINIONS China is too powerful to be reined in by diplomacy or tariff policy alone, Steven Rattner writes. Here is a column by Michelle Cottle on Trump’s obsession with naming things after himself. 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 In Milan. Lucia Buricelli for The New York Times Carbo-loading: Olympic athletes are taking their pasta consumption to the next level at the Games in Italy, spaghetti’s ancestral home. Sighting: A gray wolf was spotted in the Los Angeles region for the first time in nearly a century. Recycling: A brother-and-sister team in Spain works with divers to give abandoned plastic fishing nets a second life as home décor. Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was a ranking of the best Super Bowl ads. TODAY’S NUMBER 972 — That was the record for the number of career wins for a high school boys basketball coach in New York State. After 45 consecutive years at a high school in Queens, could Ron Naclerio beat it? Read his story. OLYMPICS The medal count. The Athletic Skiing: Lindsey Vonn, in her first public comments since crashing in the women’s downhill, said she had suffered a complex tibia fracture that is stable but will require multiple surgeries to fix. Curling: The U.S. mixed doubles team reached the gold medal match with a 9-8 upset win over defending the Olympic champion, Italy. The Americans will face Sweden today. Hockey: Team USA beat Switzerland 5-0 and improved to 3-0 in the women’s preliminary round. Next for the Americans is a showdown with Canada. Skiing: Philipp Raimund of Germany went from pulling out of a competition almost a year ago because of his fear of heights to winning gold in the men’s normal hill ski jump. RECIPE OF THE DAY Nico Schinco for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne. I love Alexa Weibel’s recipe for kimchi chicken lettuce wraps for its precision — for the way she cooks most of the kimchi with ground chicken, to mellow it, but holds back enough to garnish the finished wraps at the end. Make sure to taste the hoisin sauce before using. Some brands are sweeter than others, and you may want to adjust accordingly. Would I make it with ground turkey or pork or beef instead? I would if that’s what I had. AN AMERICAN PRINCESS Sarah Pidgeon Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times The actress Sarah Pidgeon plays Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in “Love Story,” a new series about the proto-influencer’s life with John F. Kennedy Jr. — and their tragic deaths in a small plane lost in the fog off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. Alexis Soloski, an arts writer, profiled her in advance of the show’s premiere on Thursday. “There’s so much that’s so admirable,” Pidgeon said of Bessette-Kennedy. “I wanted to fiercely advocate for that interpretation of her, that she’s more than just her clothes.” More on culture Bad Bunny showcased Puerto Rican pride and history during his 13-minute halftime show performance, our critic Jon Caramanica writes. He had help from Toñita, a woman who runs the Caribbean Social Club in Brooklyn. (Late night hosts discussed the halftime show.) Wallace Shawn is probably the most famous avant-garde playwright in the world, Susan Dominus writes for T Magazine, though he’s recognized on the street for his screen roles (remember the “inconceivable” Vizzini in “The Princess Bride”?) rather than for his playwriting. That’s understandable, of course. But it makes for a curious life. “It’s unbelievably strange!” Shawn told her. “Unbelievably strange!” Read her profile here. Broadway fans are having fun on TikTok, reports Jesse Green, a culture reporter. “It’s where more and more fans go to experience musical theater — and to recreate it,” he writes. “Step for step, smile by smile, in bursts of 30 seconds or so, they imitate the originals and put their bodies into the scene.” The results are delightful. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Read “Poems From an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936-1995” by Iris Murdoch. Murdoch, the celebrated novelist who died in 1999, thought her poetry was mediocre. “It isn’t,” writes our critic Dwight Garner, adding that it’s “emotionally charged and shorn, like the blunt chop of the uneven bangs she wore, of clever words and shallow feelings.” Get your resolutions for the new year back on track with these simple tips. Make your bed more comfortable with the best sheets tested by the hypersomniacs at Wirecutter. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was cocktail. 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 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 February 12 Author Members Posted February 12 February 11, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. At least nine people were killed and 25 injured in a shooting in a remote town in western Canada. Late last night, the F.A.A. halted all flights to and from the airport in El Paso, the nation’s 23rd largest city. The agency cited “special security reasons,” surprising local officials. And the police investigating the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie detained a person for questioning but later released him. We’ll get to more news below. But first, you’d be surprised about when you can trust A.I. with your health, and when you can't. Fabio Consoli Dr. Chatbot For hypochondriacs, A.I. chatbots are a windfall. Ask the computer a few questions and the adrenaline begins to flow. You almost certainly have psoriatic arthritis! That is plantar fasciitis. You should probably seek treatment for that B12 deficiency. Really? Probably not. Those chatbots are no better than Google, itself no doctor, at helping users find a correct diagnosis, according to a study published this week. Worse, A.I. can deliver misinformation about your health, or change the advice it offers if you ask the question a second time, using different wording. Not one of the chatbots evaluated in the study is ready to be used for actual patient care, reported Teddy Rosenbluth, one of our health reporters. But, wow, a lot of people use them for exactly that. One in six adults regularly use chatbots to explore health information. And big A.I. companies, including Amazon and OpenAI, have unveiled products that are specifically designed to answer the health questions of their users. Scutwork and coaching Of course, your doctor may well be using a chatbot already, too. One told Gina Kolata, a science reporter, that A.I. is taking over what he deemed “some of the scutwork” that doctors do, including compiling notes on patient visits. (That’s also a story line on the current season of “The Pitt.”) Another said he uses a chatbot to practice difficult conversations with patients. There are situations in which A.I. can do better than doctors, Gina reported. A.I. is better at reading electrocardiograms, for instance. It finds patterns in the data that cardiologists can’t see. It also pays close attention to details of medical screening and offers good counsel about sleeping and eating. It can also help in performing triage on a group of patients, shunting some toward nurse practitioners and freeing the doctor to work with patients who need complex care. That is leaving some doctors nervous. A.I., one told Gina, “will make people like me less and less valuable.” But not yet. “I think our doctoring role may look a little different,” another doctor told her. “But I will still be sitting on a little rolling stool, talking to the patient.” Read Gina’s story here. The diagnosis Talk to your doctor! Talking to a chatbot, especially if you’re seeking a psychological diagnosis, is risky. The Times spoke to more than 100 therapists and psychiatrists across the country who are treating problems caused or compounded by discussions with A.I. They told the reporters that while there were some positive effects — like helping patients understand their diagnoses — the conversations could also lead to patient anxiety and in some cases to psychosis and suicidal thoughts. “As with all new technologies, it can be used as a powerful force in both positive and negative ways,” one doctor told the reporters. In the meantime, heed the axiom: A.I., like airplanes and skid loaders, works far better in the hands of experienced operators. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. IN ONE CHART Source: Federal Election Commission. Ashley Wu/The New York Times Democrats have a financial problem. House and Senate Republicans have around $320 million at their disposal — more than double the Democrats’ $137 million. And that’s not even counting the more than $300 million in President Trump’s super PAC, which he could choose to spend on the midterms. It’s an unusual position for Democrats. In the 2024 presidential race, the party and Kamala Harris’s campaign raised $2 billion — far more than Trump and the Republicans’ $1.2 billion. Read about the fund-raising battle. More on the midterms Senator Susan Collins, a Republican and an outspoken Trump critic, is running for re-election in Maine. Democrats consider her seat crucial to winning the Senate. Analilia Mejia, a progressive activist aligned with Senator Bernie Sanders, appears to have won a special election for a House seat in New Jersey. An unusually large number of former federal workers are running for office this fall, some motivated by Trump’s attacks on civil servants. THE LATEST NEWS Shooting in Canada The police in Canada say the suspected shooter was among those found dead at the high school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, where the attack occurred. Students and teachers hid for hours in the school after the shooting started. Canada introduced new gun reforms after a mass shooting in 2020, but a buyback program has proved contentious. Trump Administration At the Stonewall National Monument last year. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times A Pride flag was removed from the Stonewall monument in Manhattan, a historic site for the gay rights movement, after a directive from the federal government. A grand jury declined to indict six Democratic lawmakers who took part in a video reminding members of the military of their obligation to refuse illegal orders. A judge said the Trump administration could not deport a Tufts student who was arrested last year after writing a pro-Palestinian opinion article. The Epstein Files Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, acknowledged in a Senate hearing that he had traveled to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. A former Palm Beach, Fla., police chief said Trump told him in 2006 that “everyone” knew of Epstein’s actions and described his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, as “evil.” The pop star Chappell Roan announced that she had left her talent agency after its founder appeared in the Epstein files. The Epstein files have ruined the reputations of so many prominent people that some figures — including the Dalai Lama — have felt pressure to say they aren’t connected to him. Immigration The heads of ICE and Customs and Border Protection declined to answer questions about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during a congressional hearing. In their first extended interview, Pretti’s parents spoke to The Times about the nightmare of anger, grief and unanswered questions they have faced since their son’s death. The Homeland Security Department seems to have a playbook for what to do after an immigration agent is involved in a shooting. Our reporter Allison McCann describes it below. Click to watch. The New York Times Around the World The owner of a bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, met with the U.S. commerce secretary hours before Trump threatened to block the opening of a new bridge between the cities. Russia imposed new restrictions on Telegram in its latest internet crackdown. Other Big Stories The F.D.A. refused to review a new mRNA flu vaccine by Moderna. Elon Musk told employees that his artificial intelligence company needed a factory on the moon to build A.I. satellites. OPINIONS The feeling of awe allows for a neurobiological reset. In this news climate, thank goodness the Winter Olympics delivers it, Kelly Corrigan writes. Here is a column by Jamelle Bouie on the impact of ICE’s actions. 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 Near Los Angeles. Loren Elliott for The New York Times Cat crossing: Between 2018 and 2023 alone, California added 550 miles of lanes to state highways. Now the state is building a huge concrete and steel crossing to help the mountain lions endangered by the roads. Celebrity spotting: For some fans, getting a glimpse of Sunghoon, a K-pop superstar who is in Milan as an ambassador for the South Korean Olympic team, is a competitive sport. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about the Trump administration’s plans to cut health funding from four Democrat-led states. A clown: Philippe Gaulier often insulted the students in his comedy classes, but many became stars, including Sacha Baron Cohen, Emma Thompson and Rachel Weisz. He died at 82. TODAY’S NUMBER 3.2 billion — That is the number of MetroCards the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York ordered between 1993, when the cards were first tested, and the end of 2025, when they were phased out. Artists who use the blue-and-yellow transit passes in their work are starting to run out. Read about their distress. WINTER OLYMPICS Vincent Alban/The New York Times Hockey: The U.S. women’s team won a decisive 5-0 victory over Canada. Figure skating: The American Ilia Malinin is in prime position to win the men’s individual gold after scoring a 108.16 in the short program. The “Quad God” has a 5.09-point lead over Yuma Kagiyama of Japan heading into Friday’s decisive free skate. Curling: Cory Thiesse became the first American woman to win a medal in the sport at the Olympics after she and Korey Dropkin took silver in the mixed doubles. Skiing: Ben Ogden ended the U.S.’s 50-year Olympic medal drought in men’s cross-country skiing when he took silver in the sprint. The New York Times RECIPE OF THE DAY Nico Schinco for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Kaitlin Wayne. Chicken piccata but make it pasta. That was Christian Reynoso’s excellent idea, and the recipe he developed delivers a buttery, comforting weeknight dinner that’s long on the flavors of lemon and capers. The crisped-up bits of flour-dusted, sautéed chicken (use skinless thighs, please) recall the crust of the original dish. I like it with chopped parsley as garnish and a lot of freshly ground black pepper. IT’S SHOWTIME Rachel Scott Daniela Spector for The New York Times Rachel Scott, the new designer at Proenza Schouler, the luxury women’s-wear brand, will open New York Fashion Week today with what Vanessa Friedman, our fashion critic, calls the most anticipated show of the New York collections. “What she likes are bell bottoms with big white buttons at the calf, like sailor pants, that can actually be undone to flash a bit of leg,” Vanessa writes. “Shoes that are witchy-pointy or pumps with a bulbous square toe that look like a cross between a clown shoe and a career girl’s uniform. A skinny rectangular evening bag that is big enough to actually put stuff in and derives its fanciness from contrasting textures rather than decorative beading.” More on culture The hyperpop producer Danny L Harle has worked with Dua Lipa and Caroline Polachek. On his new solo album he’s exploring his own sound. He calls it “euphoric melancholy.” Check it out. Artists play an important role in American cities, though they often lose their housing when rents rise. Several nonprofits in San Francisco are trying to break that cycle by buying properties and guaranteeing that artists can stay in them, reports Zachary Small, who covers the arts. The idea is catching on in other places, too. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Michael Hession/NYT Wirecutter Pour hot water over one of the best instant noodles found by the perpetual dorm-room chefs at Wirecutter. (They’ve tested 45 varieties!) Climb a sheer mountain face from the comfort of your couch with an alpinist video game. Pop a supplement if you need to, but my colleagues on the Well desk report that you may not need to. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was inhibitor. 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 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 February 13 Author Members Posted February 13 February 12, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The Canadian authorities identified the suspect in Tuesday’s mass shooting in British Columbia but have yet to determine a motive. And The Times learned what triggered a brief shutdown of the airspace over El Paso. We’ll get to more news below. But first, let’s hear from Conor Dougherty, who covers housing for The Times. His latest story explores the possibility of relieving the housing crisis by … building cities from scratch. In Irvine, Calif. Matt Gush/Shutterstock. Neotown by Conor Dougherty Amid the sprawl of Orange County, Calif., is something unusual: A 300,000-person city with a dense base of employment, a university, manufacturing and high-rise office buildings. Irvine, which until the 1960s was a panorama of grain and citrus farms, came together quickly and not organically: A single business, the Irvine Company, planned most of its parks, streets and structures. It still owns most apartments, shopping centers and offices — even a local newspaper. Almost no place in America is more completely a company town. As the country grapples with a housing shortage — economists say there are four to seven million too few homes — Irvine’s model has gained a new appeal. What more efficient way to produce homes than by building on vacant land without the complexities of an existing city? Enticed by the potential profits and eager to have more control over their footprint, investors and businesses are backing new town and neighborhood concepts that, like Irvine, are guided by a private hand. North of San Francisco. Aaron Wojack for The New York Times Start-up cities Open land represents the future in its purest form — after all, every place was no place at some point. Some of the new plans are dead serious, others fanciful. Perhaps not surprisingly, their most enthusiastic proponents tend to be technology billionaires. Starbase, Texas, has clusters of employee housing built around SpaceX facilities near the Mexican border. Other Texans want to use abundant land and loose development laws to seed start-up communities with names like Proto-Town and Austantinople. Silicon Valley moguls have proposed building a city of 400,000 people on sheep farms an hour north of San Francisco. California Forever, the company behind the project, has spent about $1 billion acquiring 70,000 acres of farmland. In 2021, Marc Lore, the billionaire founder of the shopping portal Jet.com, announced Telosa, which is imagined as a desert city of five million people. Telosa has employees and a website with animations of elevated trams. But it has yet to acquire any land. Devon Zuegel, a software engineer, proposed a new neighborhood in the Sonoma County city of Cloverdale. The project, called Esmeralda, would occupy a site where the city had earlier approved a golf course neighborhood dotted with large, single-family homes. Zuegel’s hope is to execute a kind of planning U-turn — with more density, shops, offices and hotel rooms connected by walkways and a community plaza. Despite its planning successes, Irvine remains every bit as car-centric as the bedroom communities around it. The goal of many of today’s start-up cities and neighborhoods is to upend the suburban form and reduce car use by creating walkable small towns. Hard to pull off Irvine was part of a new town movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which included the cities of Reston, Va., and Columbia, Md., both outside Washington, as well as the Woodlands, Texas, near Houston. Demand for housing exploded as baby boomers began to buy homes. Cookie-cutter subdivisions sprouted to meet the demand, but they were so uniform and ugly that developers began seeking alternatives. The Irvine Company jump-started its town by donating 1,000 acres for a new University of California campus and building housing for the school, which attracted more businesses, more employees, more housing and so on. Today, its neighborhoods are layered with single-family houses and multiunit buildings. But while Irvine thrived, the movement it was a part of did not. Since 1960, there have been several dozen attempts to create new town communities, most of which have failed to attract more than a few thousand residents. Every development is risky. A whole city is extraordinarily so. A developer must first build a water supply, power lines, sewer pipes and other infrastructure — a project that takes many years and consumes potentially billions of losses before the first home is built. The more daunting hurdle is attracting enough jobs to create an economic base, since people want to live within a reasonable distance of their work. That’s why America’s most successful new cities in the postwar era are on the edge of bustling places where outward growth was already underway, one scholar told me. There is no Reston without Washington, no Irvine without Los Angeles. As America looks to solve its housing shortage, new cities are likely to be part of the solution. But you probably won’t have to drive far to find them. Read about how these cities are approaching cars in my new story. For more: In the video below, Matthew Goldstein, a business reporter, explains why an executive order from President Trump to curtail Wall Street’s power in the housing market may not be effective. Click to play. The New York Times LASER BLAST Late Tuesday night, the F.A.A. shut down the airspace around El Paso for 10 days, citing “special security reasons” — without explaining what that meant. The move surprised airlines, travelers and even others in the federal government. By yesterday morning, though, the restrictions were gone. And The Times learned the reason for the shutdown: Customs and Border Protection had fired a high-energy anti-drone laser, on loan from the Pentagon, without giving aviation officials time to assess the risks to commercial airlines. The target of the laser? According to people familiar with the matter, it was a party balloon that the military thought was a cartel drone. THE LATEST NEWS Politics The U.S. unemployment rate fell in January as the economy added 130,000 jobs, mostly in health care. The polling agency Gallup announced that after nearly 90 years, it would no longer track U.S. presidential approval ratings. The House voted to cancel Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Trump ordered the Pentagon to start buying more electricity from coal-burning power plants. The 21-year-old official behind a spree of Labor Department social media posts that parroted white-nationalist messaging has been recruited by the Department of Homeland Security. The Epstein Files Pam Bondi Eric Lee for The New York Times Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to apologize to survivors of Jeffrey Epstein who attended her House Judiciary Committee testimony. The L.A. 2028 Olympics chairman will continue leading preparations for the Games despite calls for him to resign after his name surfaced in the Epstein files. Grainy videos from inside Epstein’s Florida home appear to show him with young women. Around the World Near Nuuk, Greenland, last year. Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images NATO plans to increase its military presence in the Arctic after a push from Trump Trump said “nothing definitive” came out of a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on the subject of Iran. Switzerland will hold a referendum in June on whether to cap its population at 10 million until 2050 by limiting immigration. OPINIONS The Trump administration’s lawlessness undermines social order by making citizens distrust their government, the Times editorial board writes. Every institution that claims to protect us seems to be failing. Learning self-defense is more important than ever, Rana Abdelhamid 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 Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Animal explorers: Seals tagged with electronic sensors are collecting data about the changing climate in Antarctica. Changing tastes: Malaysian durian farmers made a lot of money over the last decade as China snapped up their produce. Then preferences shifted and the market collapsed. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was a video about what happens after immigration agents shoot someone. TODAY’S NUMBER 2,400 — That is the approximate population of Tumbler Ridge, the remote community in British Columbia where a mass shooting on Tuesday left nine people, including the suspected shooter, dead. “I will know every victim,” the mayor said. SPORTS Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press Skeleton: Vladyslav Heraskevych of Ukraine was disqualified for planning to wear a helmet commemorating countrymen killed in the war with Russia. Speedskating: Jordan Stolz of Team U.S.A. set an Olympic record in the men’s 1,000-meter race, coming from behind to win his first gold in one minute, 6.28 seconds. Figure skating: The American ice-dance duo Madison Chock and Evan Bates, the favorite to win gold, was upset by Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron of France and took silver. Women’s moguls: Liz Lemley and Jaelin Kauf turned in the best Olympic performance ever for the U.S. in the women’s freestyle skiing moguls. Lemley won the gold medal, and Kauf captured the silver. The New York Times RECIPE OF THE DAY Armando Rafael for The New York Times Fresh mushrooms and baby bok choy from the market, firm tofu from the fridge and some dried ramen noodles from the cabinet over the toaster oven. Combine these with tahini, miso, soy sauce and chile crisp and you’ve got a terrific, spicy mazemen for dinner in under a half-hour. Hetty Lui McKinnon’s smart recipe has you crumble the tofu so it sucks up more of the intensely flavored sauce and points out that if you don’t need the dish to be vegan, you can finish it with a soft-boiled egg. It breaks apart in the tossed noodles, allowing the yolk to bring even more sheen and body to the whole. JAMES VAN DER BEEK, 1977-2026 Warner Bros. James Van Der Beek, the blond, dimpled, hazel-eyed actor who in the late 1990s captured the hearts of countless Americans while playing a virginal teenager learning to love on the TV drama series “Dawson’s Creek,” died yesterday at 48. The cause was colorectal cancer. Read his obituary, then stream his best performances. More on culture Few movie critics can pan a film so deliciously as our critic Manohla Dargis, though sometimes you have to wait for the skillet to drop. “For her shiny new take on ‘Wuthering Heights,’ the writer-director Emerald Fennell has drenched the screen with torrential rain, filled it with pantomimes of passion and tried hard to compete with Emily Brontë,” she writes. “What a mistake!” “The Traitors,” a reality competition series on Peacock, became a buzzy smash by pitting disparate celebrities — Bravo Housewives, Taylor Swift’s future mother-in-law, a K-pop star — against one another in a murder-mystery party game. It’s a tangled, campy mess, writes Joe Coscarelli, who covers pop culture. He spoke to the executives responsible for casting the show to learn their recipe for building an exquisite mix of complementary and clashing personalities. Late night hosts booed Pam Bondi’s behavior. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Read “BUtterfield 8,” John O’Hara’s 1935 novel about a troubled young woman navigating a sexy, gritty, dangerous life in speakeasy Manhattan during the Great Depression. The way things work around here, the writer Fran Lebowitz recommended O’Hara to my friend Carolyn, who told me Fran said O’Hara was one of the great underrated American novelists. I said I’d see about that. And here we are. If I had a book club, it’d be this month’s selection. Remove from your garments those terrible marks! Apply the best stain removers tested by the messy eaters at Wirecutter. Eat garlic to improve your heart health. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was femininity. 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. We’ll be back tomorrow. — Sam P.S. Yesterday, we said Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, was “an outspoken Trump critic.” Mainers on the right and left clapped back. Their point: Collins has criticized the president, but she has also voted with her party on most of the measures Trump favors. 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 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 February 15 Author Members Posted February 15 February 13, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The Trump administration repealed its own authority to fight climate change. Members of Congress left Washington without funding the Department of Homeland Security, putting the agency on a near-certain path to a shutdown this weekend. And Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer resigned after the Justice Department released files showing her extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We have a lot more news below. But I’m going to start with the Olympics. U.S. women’s hockey fans. Vincent Alban/The New York Times Postcards from Italy My family has been sprawled across the living room couch for much of this week, watching the Winter Olympics. Our group chat pings and buzzes throughout the day, announcing this medal or that one, a devastating fall, a victory charged with emotion. Heartbreak, redemption, repeat. The United States women’s hockey team, with a 4-0 record in the preliminary round, faces off against Italy in the quarterfinals this afternoon. Can’t wait. Still, there’s a sterility in much of what we see on the screens, as everything in Italy unspools before us in glossy montages built in editing suites, in crowd shots heavy with flags and nation-branded outerwear. Enjoyable as the Olympics have been, it can be difficult to get a sense of life on the ground in Milan and Cortina, in places where the cameras are not. To get one, I pinged a few of my colleagues who are covering the Games. I asked them to send us postcards, to let us know what they’ve seen. Bocce on ice Here’s one from Jason Horowitz, our Madrid bureau chief. He covered Italy for years as The Times’s Rome bureau chief: America’s curling fans were getting rowdy. On Tuesday night in Cortina d’Ampezzo, I sat up in the stadium’s old wooden rafters with die-hard fans of Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin, the American mixed doubles team playing for the gold against Sweden. They mostly chanted “Cory” or “Korey,” and “U.S.A., U.S.A.” But as the match grew tense at the end, and the Americans had an opening, the cheering took a turn. “Finish it!” screamed one man near me. “FINISH IT!” The “Sweep the leg” energy of the American fans elicited more than a few looks of disapproval from the non-Americans in the stands. But Dropkin, the pride of Broomstones Curling Club in Massachusetts and now a real estate agent in the American curling Mecca of Minnesota, egged them on. He pumped up the crowd by raising his broom. He spread his arms and made gimme-more motions with his fingertips. One of the fans, wearing a stars-and-stripes fleece, shouted, “Korey, show us your biceps,” and he flexed. A day earlier, the Americans had squeaked past the Italian team in a nail-biter, eliminating Cortina’s hometown favorite. Afterward, Dropkin rushed off the ice to the stands and delivered dramatic roundhouse fist pumps, a sort of curling end-zone dance. “Annoying,” said Cortina’s mayor, Gianluca Lorenzi. Himself a former curler on Italy’s national team, Lorenzi told me one of the best parts of the sport was its spirit of fair play, and the tradition in which winners buy a soda for the losers after the match. It wasn’t clear if the Swedish sister-brother team of Isabella and Rasmus Wranå, who quietly prevailed over the Americans for the gold, bought Dropkin a Coke. Blades of glory The U.S. figure skater Ilia Malinin on Thursday. Doug Mills/The New York Times Motoko Rich is the current Rome bureau chief and was previously the top reporter in the Tokyo bureau: I am, at best, a fair-weather figure skating fan, tuning in only once every four years for the Olympics. But I feel giddy with the privilege of having a press credential that allows me to watch the skating live. Even from a nosebleed seat in the media tribune, the view feels better than the highest-resolution television screen. I love the routines, of course. But also: the costumes that keep the glitter industry in business! The floppy mullets that seem so popular among the men! The throwback music! Ilia’s unbelievable backflip! I love those interstitial moments when television viewers are watching commercials and we’re sitting in the stadium waiting for the next group to come onto the ice for their final warm-ups. I am transfixed by the volunteers with buckets and shovels who go out onto the ice to clear up the chips created by the skaters’ blades, and then I sink into the Zamboni zone, watching the meditative resurfacing, back and forth and around the perimeter. Such a simple pleasure, seeing the scratched ice emerge pristine. Northern exposure Leanne Abraham/The New York Times Kim Severson is a reporter who jumps in on any story that promises to let her see new stuff. She’s north of Milan, at the hubs for Alpine skiing: The Olympics look very different in Bormio, a medieval town tucked against the Stelvio national forest. There is no Uber and no ICE protests, but there are thermal baths built by the Romans. If you want, you can do as some of the roughly 4,000 residents do and amble around the streets just outside the feared Alpine course to watch the action. Also worth noting: This is the place where they will host ski mountaineering for the first time. To me, ski-mo is one of the purest Olympic sports, born of something people who live in the Alps have always needed to do: Go up and down the mountain. Livigno is another story. For centuries, no tax has been collected there (a quirk of isolation and politics). People who grew up in the Valtellina Valley remember it as the place where families would head on the weekends for cheap gas, sugar and electronics. Then the ski industry came. Now the ski set flocks here for the slopes and duty-free Gucci. Towering over everyone is a metal skeleton the height of a 15-story building that allows for a dramatically steep drop-in to the jump that ski and snowboard competitors use to launch themselves spinning into the sky. Just beyond it are the halfpipe and the ramps that make up the slopestyle course. It’s a more rock’n’ roll atmosphere than Bormio, with snowboarder vibes. Livigno is also a long way from Bormio, where several of us are staying. If you’re lucky, the slow, snaking bus trip through the mountains takes about an hour and 20 minutes. More on the Games Hockey: The U.S. opened the men’s tournament with a 5-1 win over Latvia. Brock Nelson, whose uncle was part of the Miracle on Ice in 1980, scored two goals. Snowboarding: Chloe Kim finished second in the women’s halfpipe, an event she had won in the two previous Games. Choi Gaon of South Korea, 17, won gold. Skiing: Elis Lundholm of Sweden became the first openly transgender athlete to compete in the Winter Games. Lundholm, who was born female and transitioned to male, finished 25th in the women’s moguls qualifying. More skiing: Breezy Johnson crashed in the women’s super-G and didn’t medal. But she walked away with a different prize: Near the finish line, her boyfriend got on one knee and proposed. The Athletic SCORCHED EARTH The E.P.A. yesterday officially rejected the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases threaten human health and the environment. That means, legally speaking, the agency is no longer allowed to regulate them. The danger of climate change has been accepted as fact by politicians, including many Republicans, for decades. But President Trump has dismissed it as a “hoax,” and his administration is now effectively saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong. Trump’s E.P.A. administrator called yesterday’s announcement “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” The administration claimed it would save auto manufacturers and other businesses an estimated $1 trillion, although it has declined to explain how it arrived at that estimate. THE LATEST NEWS Politics Federal agents in Minneapolis last week. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times The Trump administration says it’s ending the deployment of immigration agents in Minnesota. Senate Democrats blocked a spending bill needed to keep the Department of Homeland Security running past tonight. (Here’s what will happen if the agency shuts down.) An intelligence intercept last year, which a whistle-blower accused Tulsi Gabbard of trying to hide, involved a conversation about Jared Kushner, according to officials. In the Courts A federal judge in Illinois blocked the Trump administration’s plan to claw back about $600 million in public health funds from four Democratic-led states. A judge temporarily blocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from punishing Senator Mark Kelly for a video reminding soldiers not to follow illegal orders. El Paso The abrupt closure, and then reopening, of the airspace around El Paso was one of the most public flare-ups in what officials say is a simmering feud between the F.A.A. and the Pentagon. The El Paso episode seems to have been about a mistaken party balloon. But experts say Mexican drug cartels really do use drones at the border. Around the World A former prime minister of Norway was charged with “gross corruption” in connection with his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the Norwegian police said. Leaders and dignitaries are gathered in Munich for Europe’s biggest annual security conference. Follow our coverage. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party claimed victory in the country’s first election since a student-led movement toppled the last government in 2024. Other Big Stories Officials in New York re-raised the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, a historic site for gay rights in Manhattan, after a directive from the federal government to take it down. Art lovers and hockey stars: Here is what we know about the children, many of them 12 and 13 years old, who were killed in this week’s mass shooting in rural Canada In a series of landmark trials, people are accusing social media companies — Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube — of causing personal injury through addictive products. In the video below, our technology reporter Cecilia Kang describes what’s at stake. Click to watch. The New York Times OPINIONS If we don’t change course, many people’s closest confidant may soon be a computer, Amelia Miller writes. Grand juries are foiling Trump’s overreach, just as America’s founders intended, write Chesa Boudin, the former San Francisco district attorney, and Eric S. Fish, a law professor. 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. VALENTINE’S DAY Valentine’s Day is tomorrow and if you haven’t made a dinner reservation yet, I don’t know what to tell you. Try the diner? That said, Wirecutter has some great Valentine’s gifts — for her and for him. My editor told me he had teared up listening to readers as they recounted their most romantic moments on this podcast. Or, if you’re still out there looking, the Modern Love team has come forth with 35 new rules for dating. MORNING READS Jan Worrell at home. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times A.I. with E.Q.: At 85, Jan Worrell lived alone on a remote corner of the Washington coast. Could a robot help her stay in her home? Alcohol and biology: From the moment you take a sip, drinking starts to change your body. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about hidden camera footage from Jeffrey Epstein’s home office in Palm Beach, Fla. A Bach evangelist: Helmuth Rilling was the first conductor to record all of Johann Sebastian Bach’s nearly 200 sacred cantatas. He died at 92. TODAY’S NUMBER 9 — That’s how many months in prison a federal judge sentenced a former boss of the Colombo crime family to serve, after the career criminal ignored the court’s order to stay away from his former associates during his supervised release. Instead, he attended a mob Christmas party in Brooklyn. RECIPE OF THE DAY Kelly Marshall for The New York Times Jerrelle Guy spent years trying to recreate her Auntie Nae’s special recipe for spicy Creole tetrazzini, working in her memory palace to conjure its creamy spiciness. There’s a lot of black pepper and Creole spice mix in it, along with a healthy zap of cayenne pepper. But never fear: A generous helping of cream cheese tempers the heat. Jerrelle says she’s good with us adding a half-pound or so of chopped chicken to brown in the butter at the start of the recipe, and I’m happy for that. (Mushrooms would work well, too.) As Jerrelle’s cookbook declares, “We fancy!” A MYSTERY MAN Sean Hayes in “The Unknown.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times “The Unknown,” which opened last night, is an electric new monologue by David Cale. It’s slippery and feels timeless, says our new theater critic, Helen Shaw, filled with sleight-of-sound, a story about a playwright’s stalker-suitor-tormentor who might just be in his own mind. “I felt like I was listening to radio drama on a rainy night,” she writes, “or as if someone were reading me a familiar story, but I’d forgotten the ending.” More on culture The free expression group PEN America named two longtime senior employees as co-chief executives yesterday, 16 months after the previous leader left in a firestorm that followed the group’s response to the war in Gaza. Was Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance an example of the art of protest? Wesley Morris and Sasha Weiss discuss that on a new episode of the “Cannonball” podcast. Listen in — and watch. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS At the Nobu Hotel in Barcelona. Nobu Hotel Barcelona Travel like the ultra rich. Or learn how travel advisers make that possible, anyway. One client demanded a hotel room with a window facing west, to show the sun setting on the horizon — not behind a tree or a mountain, but straight down into the sea. Done. (This takes money.) Take advantage of the best Presidents’ Day deals, with help from the bargain-hunting internet sleuths at Wirecutter. Learn how to deal with disappointment, with help from Olympians who’ve experienced it on the world stage. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was frontman. 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 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 February 16 Author Members Posted February 16 February 14, 2026 Good morning. On Valentine’s Day, consider the ways in which we’re sticking to established paths — and the places where we yearn to deviate. María Jesús Contreras Open road By Melissa Kirsch After a blizzard in New York City, a pedestrian accustomed to crossing the street mid-block may find herself barricaded in, banks of plowed snow creating a fortress, forcing her to walk the length of the shoveled sidewalk to the crosswalk, as the urban planners intended. Follow the grid, same as everyone else, no shortcuts. That is, unless someone has, mercifully, carved an incursion into the snow bank, creating a makeshift means of egress, a way out. These unofficial trails that permit deviation from the prescribed route are known as “desire paths.” Desire paths (or, sometimes, “desire lines”) show up after snowstorms, as my colleagues Anna Kodé and Amir Hamja documented this week, but you can find them anywhere humans have decided the official trail is too indirect: Those dirt trails that branch off paved walkways in parks, offering a shorter route from A to B, are desire paths, too. Has there ever been a more romantic name for a traffic pattern? (Maybe there has? In 1978, William Least Heat-Moon published “Blue Highways,” an account of traveling U.S. back roads — they used to be blue on old highway maps — in his van after the loss of his job and the breakup of his marriage. A heartbreaking title, but desire path still wins, I think.) The word desire has an ache in it. That’s why its application to a trail deviating from a snowy sidewalk is so affecting — it’s not just that I’d prefer to walk some other way, but I have a deep longing for another way. Imagine the planning commission meeting in which bureaucrats discuss desire paths in between more mundane-sounding plans for rezoning the waterfront and building a bus stop. Desire is so tender, so intimate, so individual. The metaphor feels too easy: chart your own course, color outside the lines, take the road less traveled (or, rather, create your own road). But when you add the word desire to the equation, the process of deviating from the established route feels more urgent. Desire paths are not just ways to get from one place to another. They’re evidence, over time, that an existing design is not adequate. They “indicate yearning,” a traffic engineer told The Times in 2003. There’s something gorgeous about the collective yearning signified by an alternate path through the snow or the lawn — a silent project in which people, over time, express a common desire. When I see a desire path right where I feel the urge to deviate from the official route, I feel connected to the pedestrians who had the same idea, whose desires mirrored my own. It’s Valentine’s Day, a holiday that’s more closely associated with heart-shaped everything and dinner reservations than it is sincere expressions of emotion. If you’re feeling hemmed in by some established script for the day, why not consider your own desire path? What trail would you prefer to tread? How would you alter the terrain in your own life on an occasion that, while nominally devoted to honoring romance, can feel architected by forces that decided there’s one rose-strewn path we should all be following? “Desire lines are inherently subversive,” my colleague Anna writes. “They remind us that we have a choice, and that we can veer away from what was laid out for us.” On the map of a life, as on the map of a city, desire lines scar the landscape, those alternate routes we took when we were impelled by yearning to strike out in a different direction. “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go,” Heat-Moon wrote in “Blue Highways” of his thinking on the eve of his 13,000-mile road trip. As the snow melts in the city and the physical desire paths go with it, I’m considering the simmering desire, mine and others’, to make new, metaphorical paths, to cut lines through drifts that are walling us in, to create new ways out when the old ones no longer suffice. THE LATEST NEWS Immigration The Department of Homeland Security has run out of funding as Congress feuds over changes to ICE. But officials say the department’s essential functions will continue. Homeland Security has sent tech companies hundreds of subpoenas for names and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize ICE. Two ICE agents were placed on leave after video evidence contradicted their story of shooting an immigrant. In the Courts Harvard University. Sophie Park for The New York Times The Trump administration sued Harvard, accusing the university of failing to produce records for a federal investigation into discrimination against white applicants. A Brazilian au pair was sentenced to 10 years in prison for her role in a lurid double murder in Virginia. An Indian man pleaded guilty to orchestrating a failed assassination plot against a Sikh separatist in New York. Other Big Stories Allies of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are working to repeal state laws that require children to be vaccinated before they enter day care or kindergarten. Europe and America “belong together,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the Munich Security Conference, in a speech that echoed the Trump administration’s talking points on the threat of Western decline. Law enforcement officers closed off a street about two miles from the home of Nancy Guthrie and said the operation was related to her disappearance. Overall inflation unexpectedly eased to 2.4 percent in January, compared with the same time last year. San Francisco teachers ended their strike. All public schools in the city will reopen next week for 50,000 students. THE WEEK IN CULTURE Film and TV Jacob Elordi in “Wuthering Heights.” Warner Bros. Pictures, via Associated Press In “Wuthering Heights,” Emily Brontë described Heathcliff as a “dark-skinned gipsy.” In the new film, though, he’s played by Jacob Elordi, a white actor from Australia. The Times asked Brontë scholars to weigh in. “Neighbors,” a new dark-comic docuseries on HBO, captures the petty feuds of American life — squabbles over fences, walls and Halloween decorations. The actor James Van Der Beek died this week at 48. Maya Salam looked at a less heralded era of his career: After aging out of his “young heartthrob” phase, he opened up his home life as a family man and proud father of six. Stephen Curry makes his animated basketball debut in “Goat.” Our critic says it feels like a souped-up version of “Space Jam” plopped into the world of “Zootopia.” How do we decide which television shows to write about, episode by episode? Our TV editor reveals his strategy. Books “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Do you know the source of that quote? Take our quiz and match the literary love lines to the books they came from. “Little Women” is a lot of things, but it’s not goth. A new version reimagines its characters as a vampire, a werewolf, a bat-winged creature and a sea monster. How much do you know about romance literature? In the video below, Jennifer Harlan, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, guides you through her 101-word glossary. Click to watch. The New York Times More Culture The official portrait from Trump’s first term was never unveiled to the public. Now the president wants the Smithsonian to commission a new one. Hear how Tina Turner, Al Green, Beyoncé and other Black musicians have reinterpreted the Beatles. Grand theft artifact: A new video game, Relooted, asks players to steal stolen art. 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 Gabriel Basso in “The Night Agent.” Christopher Saunders/Netflix By Alexis Soloski 📺🕵️♂️ “The Night Agent” (Thursday): An espionage thriller in the paranoid style, “The Night Agent” returns to Netflix for a third season. Created by Shawn Ryan (“The Shield”), the show stars Gabriel Basso (“Hillbilly Elegy”) as Peter Sutherland, an F.B.I. underling with a habit of stumbling into vast conspiracies and making increasingly questionable choices as he fights his way out of them. It is paradoxically both anti-government and anti-partisan, and often pretty fun, as long as you don’t think too hard. The new season, which also stars Genesis Rodriguez, takes on dark money and campaign finance without stinting on bruising fight scenes or (a personal favorite) people screaming “night action!” into their phones. RECIPE OF THE WEEK David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne. By Melissa Clark Chocolate Self-Saucing Cake Happy Valentine’s Day to all who celebrate — and to anyone who loves an excuse to bake something with chocolate. If you’re looking for a speedy dessert to make for tonight, Yossy Arefi’s deeply bittersweet chocolate self-saucing cake comes together in under an hour with ingredients you probably already have on hand. (Pro tip: You can substitute Greek yogurt for the sour cream.) Serve it warm while the fudgy sauce is at its runniest. REAL ESTATE Connie and Rick Harlow in Biloxi, Miss. Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times The Hunt: Two empty-nesters returned to Mississippi and looked for a house where relatives and friends could gather. Which did they choose? Play our game. What you get for $2.5 million in California: A ranch house in San Rafael, a Rudolph Schindler design in Los Angeles, or a contemporary waterfront home in Lake Arrowhead. LIVING Getty Images Sleep better with others by trying these solutions for the most common bed-sharing problems. Protect your privacy when using an A.I.-powered doorbell camera. ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER Is it time for a new mattress? Before you fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars for a new mattress, you’ll want to rule out a couple of things. If you’re experiencing aches in your back or neck, you should first consider whether your pillow could be the culprit. If you have a new, supportive mattress that just doesn’t feel cushy or soft enough, a good mattress topper could help. But if your mattress sags visibly or has a permanent indentation in the shape of your body, it’s probably time for a new one. And this is one of the best weekends of the year to upgrade: We’ve rounded up the very best Presidents’ Day deals on expert-vetted mattresses — and plenty more sleep gear, too. WINTER OLYMPICS Men’s figure skating: Ilia Malinin, known as the Quad God, finished eighth in a competition in which he was heavily favored. (See how stumbles cost him a medal.) Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov, meanwhile, delivered the skate of his life to take gold. Women’s hockey: Team U.S.A. advanced to the semifinals after defeating Italy, 6-0. The Americans’ shutout streak is the longest in Olympic women’s hockey history. Women’s snowboarding: Chloe Kim missed out on gold in the halfpipe, finishing second to Gaon Choi of South Korea. We analyzed their runs — see how Choi came out on top. The New York Times NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were unevolved and unloved. 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 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 February 16 Author Members Posted February 16 February 15, 2026 Good morning. For the past two weeks, the nation’s eyes and hearts have been drawn to Tucson, Ariz. Demand for news about the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie has on many days outpaced interest in the Olympics or the Epstein files. Our coverage of the case has drawn millions of readers. Today’s newsletter explores why. News media and law enforcement personnel outside Nancy Guthrie’s home. Brandon Bell/Getty Images Her mom, and ours By Jesse McKinley My mom is 89, and her daily life is rough: She can’t travel, she can’t cook, she needs help in the bathroom. Still, her mind is still there, as is her thirst for the world outside. Her television is almost constantly on, invariably tuned to cable news. For the past two weeks, that means a lot of coverage of the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, a nonstop wash of on-the-scene reports, experts (and amateurs) who spin theories and parse tips, and beaming photos of the victim playing mahjong in happier times. True crime stories have long galvanized the public and dominated tabloids and podcasts, and the search for Guthrie since she was apparently abducted on Feb. 1 has firmly grabbed the attention of the American public. For me and many others in Gen X, this one resonates especially because we are caring for our own aging parents. Nancy, who is five years younger than my mother, has trouble walking, depends on medication, but is said to be “sharp as a tack.” Same and same and same. Of course, interest is also heightened because Guthrie’s youngest daughter, Savannah, has one of the best-known (and best-loved) faces in the media as a co-host of “Today,” the NBC morning show. Still, that frisson and fusion of celebrity and anxiety does not fully explain the way this story has broken through. So I spent the last few days talking to experts, colleagues, friends and, yes, Mom, trying to unpack the other elements. The facts in the case are spare: Guthrie disappeared just hours after a dinner out with her other daughter, Annie, and son-in law, who dropped her off at home outside Tucson, Ariz. The authorities found blood at the scene. There are purported ransom notes, one demanding $6 million. A video showed a masked man lurking near her front door. This weekend, law enforcement shut down a street and swarmed a parking lot about two miles from Guthrie’s house to search a Range Rover and a residence. But no suspects have been named. What might be fueling the fascination is the simple power of an unsolved mystery. Historians, after all, are still looking at cases like the lost colony of Roanoke and the Lindbergh baby. And now there are legions of internet sleuths jumping in, combing over maps of local terrain, possible escape routes and other recent calls to Tucson-area police agencies. Maybe this crime feels especially terrifying because it shatters our intrinsic sense of the safety of home. It taps into our innate sympathy for vulnerable victims, like children and older people. The fact that many of us feel a profound parasocial bond to famous people like Savannah has been intensified by the raw, wrenching videos she and her siblings have made pleading for help and mercy. “We received your message, and we understand,” Savannah said in one, seated between her brother and sister and speaking directly to the unknown kidnappers. “We beg you now to return our mother to us.” Savannah Guthrie and her siblings pleaded for their mother’s release in a video posted on Instagram. Savannah Guthrie, via Instagram/UGC, via Reuters Savannah Guthrie has spent her adult life in front of a camera, often exuding happiness. Yet here she spoke sans television makeup, flattering lighting or teleprompter, and with pure emotion. These videos brimmed with the authenticity our online age craves. They traveled instantly and everywhere, driving the narrative, along with the chilling images released on Day 10 of the saga that showed a sinister figure in a ski mask creeping around the victim’s door. After my story was published, some readers complained about the amount of attention Guthrie was getting in a moment of national upset over the Epstein scandal, the ICE crackdown and a flood of other daily news that seems more important, with a capital I. Others suggested we were suffering from “missing white woman syndrome,” noting that missing people of color are often forgotten by law enforcement officials and the public. Valid concerns, all. Certainly good to remember that every person who disappears leaves behind someone like Savannah and her siblings, and that they are suffering in more anonymous anguish. And so we wait along with them, in uneasy suspense: Will the victim be returned, broken but safe — or will the story end with the heartbreak of a funeral? I asked my mother the other night what she thought of the Nancy Guthrie case. She said she felt sad for the family, and deeply worried for the victim. When I asked if it made her scared about her own safety, though, she said no. “Who,” she wondered, “would want to kidnap me?” That question might well have been asked by Nancy, too. We’re trying something new today: removing the paywall for Morning readers so they have free access to select stories about the Guthrie case. Please click the links and share. Start with Jesse’s full article about how the combination of celebrity, mystery and vulnerability have kept so many of us glued to news about Guthrie’s disappearance. Our correspondent in Arizona explored how the case has shaken a tranquil corner of Tucson. “I’m not used to everybody hanging on my words”: A country sheriff has become the unlikely face of the search. Times reporters spoke to Guthrie’s friends and family for this portrait of the person behind the headlines. THE LATEST NEWS Europe and the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized the deep ties between the U.S. and Europe in a speech at the Munich Security Conference that struck a different tone from Vice President JD Vance’s scolding address last year. European leaders at the conference, however, seem increasingly focused on distancing themselves from Washington, as David E. Sanger explains. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking at the conference, tied income inequality to the rise of authoritarianism. Russia and Ukraine A makeshift memorial for Aleksei Navalny in 2024. Milan Kammermayer/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Aleksei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was most likely poisoned by a toxin found in a South American frog, five European countries said yesterday. It was the most concrete Western accusation yet that the Russian government killed Navalny. Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine would hold elections only after a cease-fire in the war with Russia. Other Big Stories A U.S. strike in the Caribbean Sea killed three people and blew up a boat that the U.S. claimed was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Ring, the Amazon-owned home security company, ended its partnership with a surveillance technology firm after a Super Bowl commercial generated backlash. An argument over a pickleball no-no — playing a shot in a part of the court known as the kitchen — set off a 20-person fight in Florida. Amtrak is often criticized for its outdated cars. The rail operator says it’s ready to change that. In the video below, Gabe Castro-Root, a travel reporter, takes us inside Amtrak’s new fleet of trains. Click to play. The New York Times THE SUNDAY DEBATE Hunter Hess in December. Maddie Meyer/Getty Images Some athletes have spoken out about politics at the Winter Olympics: After the skier Hunter Hess said he had mixed feelings representing the U.S., President Trump called him “a real loser.” Should Olympic athletes talk politics? Yes. Athletes aren’t immune to society’s changes, and many protests are personal. “Embracing athlete activism could also enhance the Olympic movement’s credibility and moral authority, demonstrating a commitment to the principles of freedom of expression and social responsibility,” Emma Sherry wrote for Tatler Asia. No. Everyone understands that athletes don’t necessarily reflect the views of their country’s leaders. “If you don’t want to represent your country, stay home from the Olympics,” the editorial board of The California Post wrote. FROM OPINION It matters more how the war in Ukraine ends than when it ends, writes Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist. Junk food companies have created generations of picky eaters, writes Helen Zoe Veit. Here is a column by Lydia Polgreen on Jeff Bezos. 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 A scene from “The Museum of Innocence.” via Netflix Istanbul on the small screen: Orhan Pamuk wanted to see his celebrated novel “The Museum of Innocence” brought to life — but on his terms. After years of negotiations, it’s now on Netflix. Looksmaxxer: Clavicular, a 20-year-old hero for narcissistic young men, has injected and ingested dozens of controlled substances to become more handsome at any cost. Buying love: Floral arrangements crafted from carefully folded cash had become a popular symbol of love in Kenya, but then they were banned. Love in translation: He speaks English. She speaks Mandarin. The secret to their happy marriage: Microsoft Translator. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about a couple’s search for a new home in Mississippi. A criminologist: Alfred Blumstein used systems theory and quantitative analysis to examine criminal behavior, transforming the study of crime. He died at 95. WINTER OLYMPICS Jordan Stolz Vincent Alban/The New York Times Men’s speedskating: Jordan Stolz won his second gold medal and set his second Olympic record. He is the first man to win the 500 meters and 1,000 meters at the same Olympics since 1980. Men’s skiing: Lucas Pinheiro Braathen of Brazil won South America’s first medal in a Winter Olympics with his victory in the giant slalom. Women’s hockey: With a goal in the third period of Canada’s 5-1 quarterfinal win over Germany, Marie-Philip Poulin tied the record for the most career Olympic goals in women’s hockey. The Athletic THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Illustration by Moonassi Read this week’s magazine. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS … Stay warm in the harshest winter conditions by doing what ski patrollers do. Conquer your insomnia? Try reading a Kindle at bedtime. MEAL PLAN Ryan Liebe for The New York Times Taking the time to plan and cook a romantic dinner is a lovely gesture. Leaving a sink full of pots and pans, however, is not. So Mia Leimkuhler and the Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter have pulled together delicious dinner options, like steak tacos, that can be made using just one pot or pan. NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was beaming. Can you put eight historical events — including the meeting of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the declaration of St. Valentine’s Day and Napoleon’s love letters — 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. Correction: In yesterday’s newsletter, we misstated the year William Least Heat-Moon published “Blue Highways,” about his road trip around the U.S. The book was published in 1982; he took the road trip in 1978. 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 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 February 17 Author Members Posted February 17 February 16, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. Happy Presidents’ Day. Savannah Guthrie made an emotional appeal for her mother’s return two weeks after she disappeared. And the Department of Homeland Security‘s funding has lapsed, but most of its agencies, including T.S.A. and ICE, are still working. There’s more news below. But let’s start today with Gisèle Pelicot. She is the French woman whose husband of 50 years repeatedly drugged and raped her in their home and invited dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious. Her story is horrifying. But as Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview” podcast, learned, Pelicot harbors deep reserves of strength and grace. I’ll let Lulu tell you about it. Philip Gay for The New York Times Surviving a horror by Lulu Garcia-Navarro I didn’t know what to expect when I sat down with Gisèle Pelicot for almost three hours on a chilly Paris day in January. Pelicot became a global symbol of empowerment after waiving her right to anonymity during a mass rape trial in France, where she publicly faced down her husband of 50 years and dozens of his co-conspirators in open court in 2024. Still, she remained something of an enigma. Her few on-camera public statements on her way to and from the courthouse were dignified but brief, and she only recently agreed to sit for an interview. Now, she’s ready to talk. Pelicot has written a searing memoir, “A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides,” about her early life, her marriage, what it was like to learn about the ways she’d been violated for years. Those monstrous crimes raised awareness of drug-facilitated sexual assault and her long and complex recovery in the wake of those revelations. Open, eloquent, emotional I’ve interviewed many survivors of sexual and physical abuse. Often, and understandably, it is difficult for people to talk about. Pelicot, 73, is also just a regular person — a former working mother of three, now a retired grandmother — who found herself in extraordinary circumstances. I wondered how open she would be when talking to a journalist. I spent hours thinking about how to phrase things sensitively, and what to ask. But from the moment we sat down, it was obvious that Pelicot had great inner strength and was ready to talk. She was open, eloquent and at times emotional. She told me that she wrote the book to be useful to others, “to show them that it is possible to overcome terrible trials. To show them that we have the resources within us to get through it.” Pelicot told me many awful stories. One of the most harrowing parts of our conversation was about the blackouts and unexplained memory loss she experienced for years, before understanding that they were a result of drugging. At the time, she thought she was losing her mind, or dying. Another moment that I’ve had trouble getting out of my head is when she talked about the men who raped her but still have not been identified by the police, and how she spent many years fearing that she would run into them. The worst part: Because she had been so heavily sedated during the assaults, they would recognize her but she wouldn’t recognize them. Ramifications and rebuilding Still, Pelicot does not want to be seen as a victim. In the years between learning what had been done to her and the trial, she divorced her husband, Dominique Pelicot, and found love again. Her new partner, whom she brought to the interview, has helped her rebuild. She told me that because she has no memory of what happened to her, it has perhaps been easier to move forward with her life. She mourns for the many women who do remember but don’t have the evidence to prove anything. She says she is “standing tall” and unbroken despite all the men who wanted to see her break. That is less true of her family. Images of her daughter Caroline were also found on Dominique Pelicot’s devices. Caroline stopped talking to her mother because she felt Gisèle wasn’t supportive enough of her concerns that she too might have been abused by her father. They are now tentatively back in touch, but Pelicot described what had happened to her family as an “explosion that blows everything away.” After the interview ended, Pelicot wiped tears from her eyes and told me she was grateful for the chance to emotionally process what had happened to her. I got the sense of a woman who had endured the unthinkable, and had somehow come through it, but there is still much she is trying to make sense of. She told me that, eventually, she wants to visit her ex-husband in prison, to get the answer to what may be an unanswerable question: Why did he do what he did to her? She knows that meeting will be hard, but it’s something she needs to do. “Maybe he’ll have some remorse when we’re face to face,” she told me. “I’m still holding on to that hope.” Watch it here or read the biggest takeaways from the conversation. WINTER OLYMPICS Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press Cross-country skiing: Norway’s victory in the team relay gave Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo his ninth career gold medal, a record for the Winter Games. Downhill skiing: The American Mikaela Shiffrin failed to reach the podium in the women’s Alpine giant slalom, finishing 11th. Italy’s Federica Brignone took gold, her second at these Olympics. Ski jumping: Anna Odine Stroem of Norway became the first woman to win two individual ski-jumping events in the same Games, taking the large hill event in its Olympic debut. Moguls: Mikaël Kingsbury earned Canada’s first gold medal of these Games, winning the inaugural competition in men’s dual moguls. Hockey: The U.S. reached the quarterfinals of the men’s tournament with a 5-1 win over Germany. The Athletic THE LATEST NEWS Politics The Washington Monument illuminated on New Year’s Eve. Heather Diehl/Getty Images U.S. Embassies around the world are aggressively fund-raising for lavish July 4 parties to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. In an interview, Barack Obama said there was a “clown show” happening on social media and television, but he did not directly address the racist video President Trump posted recently. Around the World Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, stressed Christian and cultural ties between Europe and the U.S. in his speech in Munich, but that excludes large parts of Europe’s population. Canada plans to buy more weapons from Canadian military suppliers and reduce its dependence on American companies. In Iran, antigovernment protests have ended, but Iranians say they are still angry at the government and anxious about the future. Xi Jinping has essentially removed five of the six generals in China’s top military body in the past three years as he seeks to secure control. Climate The United States effectively has no laws on the books that enforce how efficient passenger cars and trucks should be after a year of deregulation. Officials at the Winter Olympics disqualified three athletes because their equipment tested positive for “forever chemicals,” which damage the environment and the human body. The Epstein Files Naomi Campbell Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times The supermodel Naomi Campbell visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island and got him invited to parties around the world, according to newly released documents. Epstein’s ties to academics show the seedy side of college fund-raising. OPINIONS The liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society is not only viable but necessary, Jeffrey Toobin argues. To protect our children, we need times when devices, apps and games aren’t available at all, Michaeleen Doucleff writes. Here is a column by Michelle Goldberg about “Data,” a new play about a conflicted manager who is pulled into a secret project. 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 Astoria the turkey. Anna Watts for The New York Times Gobble girls: Manhattan’s only known wild turkey has her own entourage of women who look after her. Passage to freedom: A secret opening in the Merchant’s House Museum in New York City may have been part of the Underground Railroad. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about a decision by Ring, the home-security company Amazon owns, to end its partnership with a surveillance technology company. Metropolitan Diary: Maybe the cat was on a break. Bootleg tobacco: Australia has the most expensive cigarettes in the world. The prices have fueled a multibillion-dollar black market. Olympian obituaries: The Times has memorialized the lives of a figure-skating trailblazer, a “Miracle on Ice” hockey player, a bobsledder who overcame blindness and others over the years. TODAY’S NUMBER 80 — That is the approximate percentage of Bangladeshis who voted last week to give prime ministers term limits and increase women’s participation in politics. It was a victory for student protesters who ousted the prime minister in 2024. RECIPE OF THE DAY Rachel Vanni for The New York Times Lunar New Year celebrations begin tomorrow, and my old colleagues at New York Times Cooking are saluting the moment with their annual Dumpling Week extravaganza. I’m starting with Sue Li’s pork and garlic-chive potstickers, a take on a traditional pan-fried dumpling that she used to buy from a stand after morning hikes at Elephant Mountain in Taipei. The filling’s a simple mixture of ground pork and minced garlic chives, which have the texture of leeks, with a strong, garlicky flavor. That’s a wrap! THE SIMPSONS AT 37 Fox “The Simpsons” aired its 800th episode last night, on what happened to be its creator Matt Groening’s 72nd birthday. In a recent conversation, Groening told The Times there was no end in sight for the series. “I’m not going to be the guy that says it’s over,” he said. Read the interview. More on culture I was once told that the hours between 5 and 10 a.m. pulse with creativity, and that every hour that follows is decline. Some artists (and my editor!) disagree, as Ligaya Mishan writes in T Magazine: “Our minds bloom only after sundown, like those flowers that hold themselves in until the dutiful plants of day close their petals and then unleash that heady, frank, almost unbearable scent, too scandalous for waking hours.” Meet a few more of those night owls. The culture critic Wesley Morris reviewed Namwali Serpell’s “On Morrison,” a collection of essays about Toni Morrison’s complete body of work. My job here is meant to be more show than tell. But in this case? You just have to read it. Mardi Gras is tomorrow, the final day of the Christian carnival that precedes the penitential season of Lent. It’s a huge day in New Orleans. There’ll be parades all over the city, and plenty of king cakes drizzled with icing and dusted with purple, green and gold sugar. Inside many will be a small, plastic baby. Why? Some say the figurine represents the baby Jesus. Others trace the tradition of placing an object inside a celebratory cake back to Rome, before Christ was born. Debate before dessert. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS In Las Vegas. Tag Christof for The New York Times Book a flight to Las Vegas and make like Sinatra’s still crooning as the city experiences a revival of its lounge-act glory days, on and off the strip. Check out the best. Brush your teeth effectively with the best electric toothbrush recommended by the dental hygiene wizards at Wirecutter. Control your blood pressure with these simple steps. Take our news quiz. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was trigraph. 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 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 February 17 Author Members Posted February 17 February 17, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. The Rev. Jesse Jackson has died at 84. Negotiators from the U.S. and Iran are meeting in Switzerland to discuss Iran’s nuclear program. And talks on ending the war in Ukraine are happening, but hopes for a breakthrough are low. I’m going to start today, though, with a story some readers think we should start with every day: the Jeffrey Epstein files. There are an estimated 180,000 images in the latest release of the Epstein files. Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The big dig It’s hard to imagine a more difficult reporting project. For the past couple of weeks, dozens of Times journalists have been making their way through the three million pages in the latest collection of Epstein files released by the Justice Department, along with 180,000 images and 2,000 videos. To date they’ve examined only a small percentage of what’s there — much of it uncorroborated, fragmented or redacted. Many months, maybe years, of work are ahead of them as they dredge the documents for information they can verify and publish. Readers have questions about that. How is The Times searching the files? What’s the objective of the search? Do we use artificial intelligence to assist with our reporting? What do we publish and, as important, what do we not publish? Patrick Healy, an assistant managing editor who oversees The Times’s journalistic standards, talked with four of the journalists who are working on the Epstein files to kick around those questions. Here’s some of what he learned. What’s in the files. Receipts, basically: emails, text messages, bank records, witness statements, multimedia files. “We almost never get a chance to see the investigative materials underlying any case,” said Kirsten Danis, our Investigations editor. “Reporters always wish we had subpoena power. In this case, it was like we did.” How the team searches the files. Printed out, the Epstein files could be stacked to the height of the Empire State Building. You’d spend a lifetime reading them. So journalists started with search terms: Clinton, Trump, Duke of York, Gates. Steve Eder, an investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein story on and off for the past six years, worked with his colleagues to make a list of terms. Then they used those queries to scour the files for news. They’ve added new search terms every day. Artificial intelligence helps. The technology allowed the team to build tools to parse the Epstein files in just a couple of days. “That would normally take engineering teams weeks to build,” said Dylan Freedman, an editor on our A.I. projects team. And Andrew Chavez, a newsroom engineer, helped with “semantic search,” which lets journalists hunt for concepts rather than matching exact language in a document. But A.I. isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s really bad at news judgment, Dylan said: “A.I. can be sloppy and make mistakes that are inexcusable in journalism. It’s super industrious but not super intelligent.” What they’re looking for. Evidence of how Epstein went about doing what he did — and how he got away with so much for so long. Evidence of who funded his activities. Evidence of the people he sought out. The files have not delivered clear proof of blackmail, at least from what the team has seen, Steve said, but “they give us a fuller picture of how Epstein interacted with powerful people and how he seemed to see value in claiming to know things about them.” On President Trump. “We found a document that investigators had pulled together last summer summarizing more than a dozen tips they had received about Trump and Epstein, including sexual abuse,” Kirsten said. “But the tips were unverified and had no dates or names, so we couldn’t report them out ourselves, at least not right away.” It turned out to be one of the more challenging aspects of the story, Steve added. “We’ve tried to strike a balance of reporting thoroughly, explaining the existence of these tips and claims, describing what we are seeing, while also not going too far into the realm of unverified or unverifiable accounts,” he said. He acknowledged how frustrating that can be to readers who are exploring the files themselves or reading about those claims elsewhere. That frustration is real. Patrick said that many readers think The Times should be reporting even more on the Epstein files. Some are adamant that the files prove Trump is guilty of horrible crimes. He asked Kirsten about that. Her answer serves as a terrific explanation of how The Times stays independent: Trump has a troubling history with women, including being found liable for sexual abuse, and so I understand the instinct on the part of some readers to assume that similar allegations should be treated as if they are likely true. But we work differently. We don’t make assumptions; we need to verify, which often means painstaking work that can take time. Read the whole exchange here. More on the Epstein files The mayor of Los Angeles called on Casey Wasserman to resign as the chairman of the 2028 Olympics because of his ties to Epstein. Wasserman has already announced that he would sell his namesake talent agency. Thomas Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, stepped down from his role as Hyatt’s executive chairman, citing “terrible judgment” in associating with Epstein. Columbia University punished two people involved in admitting Epstein’s girlfriend into its dental college. Steve Bannon, a leader of the MAGA movement, gave Epstein advice on how to handle allegations that he was a pedophile, according to a series of texts. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. WINTER OLYMPICS The U.S. women’s hockey team. Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press Women’s hockey: The U.S. women advanced to the gold medal game after shutting out Sweden 5-0, and Canada won a 2-1 victory over Switzerland in its semifinal match. On Thursday, Team U.S.A. and Team Canada will play for gold for the seventh time. Bobsled: Elana Meyers Taylor, the most decorated female athlete in the sport’s history, won her first Olympic gold with a victory in the monobob. Skiing: Eileen Gu of China came in second in the freeski big air competition, winning her fifth Olympic medal. Megan Oldham of Canada took the gold. The Athletic THE LATEST NEWS Politics President Trump proposed some of the steepest spending cuts in U.S. history as part of his efforts to shrink the federal government. Congress has rejected most of them. Vaccine companies are curtailing research and cutting jobs. Federal policies under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have sent a chill through the industry. The Trump administration must temporarily restore displays about slavery at a historic site connected to George Washington after a judge said the government did not have the power to erase historical truths. After a year of weak job growth, January’s report was surprisingly strong. In the video below, Ben Casselman explains the numbers — and how one industry is buoying the job market. Click to play. The New York Times Immigration In Georgia, a man fleeing ICE agents crashed his car into another vehicle, killing a teacher. U.S. military veterans have been on the front lines of anti-ICE protests in Minnesota. Some of them say they’re motivated by patriotism. Debate over the H-1B visa for specialized foreign workers has fueled racist attacks against South Asians. Around the World President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia Dave Sanders for The New York Times Indonesia: A military spokesman said the country would send thousands of troops to Gaza as part of a Board of Peace initiative. Hungary: In Budapest, the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said Trump was “deeply committed” to the success of the authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban. Ukraine: Trump repeatedly promised that he would end the war in Ukraine in one day. But by most measures, the war has grown worse for Ukrainians since he returned to the White House. Other Big Stories A shooter opened fire during a high school hockey game in Pawtucket, R.I., killing two people. The police said the shooting appeared to arise from a family dispute. Anderson Cooper said he would leave his role as a correspondent for the CBS show “60 Minutes.” Members of the Guthrie family have been cleared as suspects in Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. JESSE JACKSON, 1941-2026 Mark Makela for The New York Times The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose impassioned oratory and populist vision of a “rainbow coalition” of the poor and forgotten made him the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama, died this morning. He was 84. Jackson never achieved either the commanding moral stature of Dr. King or the ultimate political triumph attained by Obama. But his ideas remain central to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and have inspired groups like Black Lives Matter. Read his obituary. And see his life in pictures. OPINIONS As the White House asserts more control over federal funds, Congress needs new ways to check the executive branch, Aziz Z. Huq and Vanessa Williamson write. Here is a column by Thomas B. Edsall on how Trump is his own worst enemy. 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 A drone flies amid the men’s moguls finals. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times The buzz from Milan: Some Olympics fans are cheering for the pilots of the Games’ omnipresent drones. Going viral: A 15-second video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise created with A.I. has Hollywood spooked. Back off! Aggressive male tortoises on a Balkan island are causing females to walk off a cliff. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about tips for controlling your blood pressure. TODAY’S NUMBER 9 — That’s how many people the French authorities have arrested as part of an investigation into a ticket scam that may have cost the Louvre $12 million. Museum employees and tour guides were among those involved. RECIPE OF THE DAY Rachel Vanni for The New York Times Dumpling week continues at New York Times Cooking, and I’m delighted to play my part by making Eric Kim’s recipe for Koreanish king dumplings, known as wang mandu. They’re not fancy — the name king is for size, not pedigree — but comforting, with a savory beef, mushroom and onion filling surrounded by a fluffy, slightly sweet bun. Eric calls for a finely chopped half jalapeño in the beef and mushroom mixture. I might live dangerously and go with the whole pepper. And don’t stint on the dipping sauce. It’s addictive. ROBERT DUVALL, 1931-2026 Robert Duvall in 1983. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Robert Duvall, the chameleonlike actor who disappeared into scores of roles in classic American films including “The Godfather,” “Tender Mercies,” “Network” and “Apocalypse Now,” died on Sunday at 95. Clyde Haberman, who wrote Duvall’s obituary, noted the actor’s ear for speech patterns, his eye for mannerisms, his ability to become his characters. “I hang around a guy’s memories,” Duvall once said. Here’s his life in pictures and where to stream his best performances. More on culture The wheels of what’s stylish turn and turn again. And so, perhaps inevitably, the side part is back. Even devoted center-parters from the 2020s, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the beauty entrepreneur Hailey Bieber among them, have shifted their parts to one side in recent months. “A revolution is afoot,” The Times reports — “or rather, ahead.” Stephen Colbert called out CBS, his own network, after it canceled a Texas congressman’s appearance on his show. THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Ruthie Darling/NYT Wirecutter; illustration by Con McHugh for NYT Wirecutter Saddle up for the Year of the Horse with 13 gifts for the Lunar New Year recommended by the red-envelope stuffers at Wirecutter. Listen better and receive more love. That’s the secret to happiness, researchers say. Well, a secret to happiness, anyway. Stream some theater this month, starting with “The Honey Trap” at Irish Repertory Theater. Our critic called it “taut, suspenseful storytelling, the kind that leaves an audience rapt — and dabbles in deception until the very last line.” GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was backroom. 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 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 February 18 Author Members Posted February 18 February 18, 2026 By Sam Sifton Good morning. It’s Ash Wednesday, and Ramadan has begun. Rescuers pulled six skiers from the site of an avalanche near Lake Tahoe, Calif. last night. Nine remain missing. There’s more news below. But I want to start today with the life and legacy of an American whose activism — and ambition — helped shape our politics and our culture. The New York Times; Associated Press; Getty Images A moral force “My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson intoned in 1984 during his address at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. “They are restless and seek relief.” I watched the speech with my mom on the modest television she reserved only for news programming. (There was no “Dynasty” for me growing up.) It was a tense moment for the party, fractured after a difficult primary season in which he had called Jews “Hymie” and New York City, my home, “Hymietown.” In his address, Jackson tried to unify the factions. It was riveting to watch but didn’t really succeed. Yet outside of the grainy old footage of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. we viewed in history classes at school, I had never seen anything like it: moral clarity delivered from a great height, albeit one accompanied by sharpened political knives for the president, Ronald Reagan. Jackson, who died yesterday at 84, held a complicated place in American culture. He was an electrifying orator who ran for president twice, registered millions of new Black voters and established a multiracial Democratic coalition, Peter Applebome writes in his obituary for The Times. Jackson’s ambition, and his eloquence, made him a moral and political force in the nation. He was also flawed, Peter writes: His transcendent rhetoric was inseparable from an imperfect human being whose ego, instinct for self-promotion and personal failings were a source of unending irritation to many friends and admirers and targets for derision by many critics. Mr. Jackson, the writer and social commentator Stanley Crouch once said, “will be forever doomed by his determination to mythologize his life.” The rainbow coalition Jackson rose from abject poverty in South Carolina to become the country’s most influential Black figure in the years between the death of Dr. King and the election of Barack Obama. He adapted the civil rights message for a post-civil-rights era as he advocated Black equality. In his 1984 address, Jackson said the Democratic Party was not perfect. “Yet we are called to a perfect mission,” Jackson continued. “Our mission: to feed the hungry; to clothe the naked; to house the homeless; to teach the illiterate; to provide jobs for the jobless; and to choose the human race over the nuclear race.” That perfect mission inspired generations of Black Democrats, Reid Epstein reported yesterday, while also demonstrating for the first time that white Americans would vote for a Black presidential candidate. His bids — the first of which ended with that speech I saw on TV — were unsuccessful. Jesse Jackson at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984. Jim Wilson/The New York Times But he blazed a new trail for Black politicians. In 1989, Douglas Wilder was elected the first Black governor of Virginia, as David Dinkins became New York City’s first Black mayor and Norman Rice became the first Black mayor of Seattle. Also that year, Ron Brown was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the first Black person chosen to lead a major political party. And in 1992, with Jackson’s support, Carol Moseley Braun became the first Black woman elected to the Senate. “Without Reverend Jackson, there never would have been Barack Obama,” Donna Brazile, who was a top organizer of Southern states in Jackson’s 1984 campaign, told Reid. That explains why flags in South Carolina flew at half-staff yesterday, and tributes poured in. They came from President Trump, from former Presidents Biden, Obama and Clinton, from faith leaders, other political figures and citizen mourners on the streets of Chicago, where Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition has its headquarters on the city’s South Side. That organization, in its advocacy for minority representation in corporate settings, in its push for voter registration, in its efforts to combat poverty and discrimination, will also be a part of Jackson’s legacy. “It’s so sad,” one Chicagoan said. “Reverend Jackson has done so much for the community.” A life in pictures One of the clearest ways to understand Jackson’s place in American history is to scroll through the photographs that captured his path. One shows him singing “We Shall Overcome” with Mahalia Jackson and Dr. King in 1966. Another is of him addressing a protest crowd in Indiana three years later. Here he is standing next to Reagan after a meeting in 1980. There, running for president in 1984 and again four years later, fire in his eyes. (Watch this moment, which went viral yesterday, when he appeared on an early “Sesame Street” episode.) Jackson watched as Barack Obama was declared the projected winner of the 2008 presidential election. Damon Winter/The New York Times Speaking of, one of my favorites, from the Times photographer Damon Winter: Jackson red-eyed and pensive, proud and maybe regretful, on the verge of tears as he watched the news of Obama’s projected presidential victory at a rally in Chicago in 2008. It recalled for me something Clayborne Carson, a history professor, told Peter for Jackson’s obituary. “Jesse Jackson played as central a role in his era as King did in his era,” Carson said. “But it was not the kind of heroic struggle as in the 1960s. You’re not going to get a Nobel Prize for what Jesse Jackson did, but it took a lot of talent, initiative, energy, imagination and charisma, and he had those in full supply.” Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world. THE EPSTEIN FILES’ FALLOUT The Justice Department’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein has revealed his ties to powerful people across Wall Street, Hollywood, academia and government. As more evidence emerges, some of those people are now losing jobs and facing investigations. Here is a chart with a few examples. See more of them here. Five people who are facing repercussions in the wake of the release of the Epstein files. WINTER OLYMPICS Alysa Liu Doug Mills/The New York Times Figure skating: Alysa Liu of Team U.S.A. turned in a nearly flawless performance in the women’s short program, putting herself in contention for gold. Downhill skiing: Lindsey Vonn, the Alpine skiing star, is back in the U.S. after undergoing four surgeries on her fractured left leg in Italy. Vonn said she had been immobile since crashing in competition on Feb. 8. Freeski: Tormod Frostad of Norway landed a near-perfect final jump to win gold in the men’s freeski big air event. Speedskating: Italy upset the U.S. for the gold medal in the men’s team pursuit. The Americans, the reigning world champions and world-record holders, took silver. The Athletic THE LATEST NEWS The Trump Administration New plans for the East Wing ballroom make clear that Trump has rejected calls to make the addition smaller. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has opened an investigation into a housing development built around a mosque outside Dallas. Immigration The White House rejected the latest proposal from Democrats for limits on ICE agents as the Homeland Security shutdown continues. Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman who is a public face of Trump’s deportation operations, is stepping down. The administration is flooding tech companies with subpoenas to identify who is behind anti-ICE accounts. In the video below, Sheera Frenkel, a tech reporter, explains how the companies have responded. Click to play. The New York Times Foreign Policy The U.S. military said it had killed 11 people in boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. The strikes raised the death toll to at least 144 in the campaign against people accused of drug smuggling at sea. The Times is tracking the strikes. Iran’s foreign minister said a day of peace talks with U.S. officials in Switzerland had yielded “good progress.” But the country remains on edge over the possibility of a U.S. attack The Trump administration announced tens of billions of dollars in planned Japanese investments in the U.S., part of a trade agreement struck last year Around the World José Jerí Angela Ponce/Reuters Peru: The country’s Congress ousted President José Jerí after he failed to disclose meetings with Chinese businessmen. His predecessor was impeached just four months ago. Spain: The government will ask prosecutors to investigate X, Meta and TikTok over the spread of sexually explicit material generated by A.I. Belgium: The foreign minister summoned the U.S. ambassador for a meeting after he accused the country of antisemitism in a social media post. New Zealand: A judge questioned the remorse of a defendant who had used A.I. to write apologies to victims and the court. Other Big Stories Warner Bros. Discovery said it would restart talks to be acquired by Paramount Skydance, which is trying to outbid Netflix. A major Manhattan hospital closed its program for treating transgender youth, citing “the current regulatory environment.” OPINIONS If Democrats want to break through in Texas, primary voters should pick candidates and ideas that resonate locally, Michelle Cottle writes. Here is a column by Jamelle Bouie on Marco Rubio’s interpretation of Western civilization. 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 Jake Michaels for The New York Times Roaring ahead: In a San Francisco garage, a team creates spectacular lions that lead Lunar New Year festivities. Robot influencers: As more people use A.I. to decide what to buy, companies are tailoring their digital marketing to chatbots. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about Anderson Cooper’s decision to leave “60 Minutes.” TODAY’S NUMBER 243 million — That’s roughly how many gallons of raw sewage had overflowed into the Potomac River as of Feb. 6, according to a local utility. It “appears to be the largest discharge of its kind in the nation’s history,” our reporters write. To produce that much waste, every person in the Washington, D.C., metro area would need to flush a toilet around 30 times. RECIPE OF THE DAY Linda Xiao for The New York Times A pressure cooker is a great way to bring a special-occasion meal onto the weeknight table. Example A: this lovely kalbi jjim from Kay Chun, which comes together in a little over an hour. (Without the pressure, it would take five or more.) Bone-in short ribs and root vegetables burble away in the garlic- and ginger-infused sauce until the meat starts to fall off the bone and the vegetables grow thick with juices. Serve with rice and plenty of kimchi. A ONE-MAN SHOW Daniel Radcliffe Lucia Bell-Epstein for The New York Times Daniel Radcliffe wanted to take a break from theater. He’d won his first Tony Award in 2024 for his part in a popular revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” That took up the better part of two years. He has a baby now, and a TV show. He’s working on a writing project. It all seemed like enough, writes Michael Paulson, who covers theater. Then a director showed Radcliffe the script for “Every Brilliant Thing,” a monologue about a man trying to show his suicidal mother reasons to love life. The role seemed perilous, he told Michael. But he thought he should do it. “Sometimes I can feel myself getting a little bit too comfortable, like it’s been a little bit too long since I’ve done something that truly is scary,” he said. Read about his choice. More on culture When did chicken become the most expensive thing on the menu? Frank Bruni, who was once The Times’s restaurant critic, returns to the world of gastro-analysis to consider how the lowly fowl became a luxury item. The prolific documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman died on Monday at 96. Once you sink into one of his movies, writes Alissa Wilkinson, a film critic for The Times, “it’s easy to lose track of time. Everyone is interesting. Every interaction is telling, or funny, or sweet, or heartbreaking.” THE MORNING RECOMMENDS Illustration by Christa Jarrold Change your phone number. It doesn’t define you. Scramble your eggs in this awesome, inexpensive nonstick pan recommended by the talented short-order cooks at Wirecutter. (By me, too.) It won’t last forever, but still: You won’t look back. Turn on your TV … for your cat. GAMES Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were pillowing and plowing. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell 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
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.