The New York Times

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April 11, 2026     Good morning. What can we learn from April, a month of contradictions that never cleanly resolve themselves? María Jesús Contreras Monthly report By Melissa Kirsch   It’s the 30th anniversary of National Poetry Month, begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. I’m celebrating it in my own fashion, reading favorite poems about April. T.S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruellest month.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was equally suspicious: “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” An idiot! When I read those lines, spring fever beginning to throb in my veins, I feel like Millay is mocking me for being so awed, again, by the magnolia blossoms flinging open their floppy petals for a brief window of delirium. To Ogden Nash, April was “Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy.” There’s the cruelty again, but he ends having come to appreciate the month’s contradictions: “I love April, I love you.” Langston Hughes’s “April Rain Song” concludes similarly: “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain.” April has, in the Northeast, been inconstant as always. A perfect spring bike ride there; a windy, rainy hustle back. The poems tend to capture this fickle quality. As Robert Frost put it: “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. / You know how it is with an April day.” We do. April days contain multiple seasons. There’s a lesson in there, if we want to take it, about holding multiple things at once. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, the challenge of containing conflicting emotions, conflicting ideas, the alternately sunny and stormy fronts of the internal weather system. I’ve been writing this new newsletter, The Good List (you should sign up!), and while it’s meant to catalog things that bring joy, it’s not meant to deny that there are difficult things in the world, or to avoid the inevitable contradictions that come from loving things: beautiful films about sad subjects, art that emerges from suffering. Things aren’t only good (or only bad). I often return to these lines from David Ferry’s translation of Horace: “It’s true that Jupiter brings on the hard winters; / It’s also true that Jupiter takes them away.” Certainty is easier. April, in much of the country, is liminal, vacillating between winter and spring, refusing to resolve cleanly. If you look closely, you can observe this tension: the tulips quivering in the gusting wind; people in shorts and people wearing mittens on the same block; stepping onto the porch to see a robin and instead seeing your own breath. The internal work is much the same. Sitting quietly, paying close attention to the weather inside, you can observe the hope that blows in with the fear, the lightness and heaviness that seem to be competing. The psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach advises greeting each experience that arises within us with the phrase “this too,” accepting what’s there, even if it’s uncomfortable. So: How are you celebrating National Poetry Month? You might listen to “The Poetry Magazine Podcast,” or, if you’re less inclined to embrace it, read the writer Ben Lerner on “The Hatred of Poetry.” Or better yet, embrace April’s spirit of contradictions and do both. While I was writing this, a friend sent me a poem by Jane Hirshfield that reminded me of poetry’s enduring potency: “Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. / Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.”   THE LATEST NEWS War with Iran Peace talks are set to begin today in Pakistan. Vice President JD Vance is leading the American delegation, which includes Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. World leaders, trying to keep the negotiations on track, have called on Israel to halt its attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. The scale of the fighting in Lebanon is staggering, with more than a million people forced from their homes. See what’s happening, in photos and video. The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is central to the talks. But Iran has been slow to do so, in part because it can’t locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway, U.S. officials say. The Times has uncovered additional evidence that U.S.-made missiles struck a sports hall and school on the war’s first day. The strikes killed 21 people, including five children. Economy Prices in the U.S. rose 0.9 percent over the course of March, the highest monthly gain since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation crisis in 2022. Gas is getting expensive, and it’s driving prices up in seemingly far-off places like grocery stores and airports. It could strain consumer spending, which has been keeping a recession at bay. Still, the S&P 500 ended the week up 3.6 percent — its strongest showing since November. Politics Several women accused Eric Swalwell, the California congressman running for governor, of sexual misconduct. He denied the accusations. Kamala Harris said she was “thinking about” running for president again in 2028. The Trump administration released its latest plan for a triumphal arch in Washington. It would rise 250 feet, across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial. A judge declined to block the Trump administration from rushing deportations of Somali migrants, while acknowledging that the government most likely singled out those people. Other Big Stories Bill Ingalls/NASA, via Associated Press The Artemis II astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, concluding their historic 10-day mission, the first to send humans around the moon in more than 50 years. A 20-year-old man was arrested and accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.   THE WEEK IN CULTURE Television The New York Times A new season of “Euphoria” starts Sunday. Since the show’s debut in 2019, three of its stars have climbed to the top of the Hollywood A-list. With its focus on the possibilities and vulnerabilities of teenage girls, “The Testaments,” Hulu’s follow-up to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” feels as prescient as ever, our critic writes. The satirical superhero series “The Boys,” which returned to Prime Video this week, won over a broad base of fans. Its showrunner, Eric Kripke, told The Times why he felt it was time to end the story. Theater Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is back on Broadway — yet again in triumph, our critic Helen Shaw writes. (During the play’s first run, in 1949, The Times’s critic raved about it twice.) The singer Pink will host the Tony Awards this year. Her songs are part of the Broadway shows “& Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.” Rosamund Pike, a star of “Gone Girl” and “Saltburn,” will make her Broadway debut this fall in the legal drama “Inter Alia.” More Culture An exhibition explores what people 500 years ago found beautiful and hideous — and how the two often go together. Mexicans protested an agreement to send a collection of little-seen Frida Kahlo works to Spain for several years. Alissa Wilkinson, a Times critic, reviews the new film “You, Me & Tuscany” in the video below. Click to watch. The New York Times 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 By Alexis Soloski   📺 Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Wednesday): Rufi Thorpe’s delectable novel about on-camera sex work, family both found and biological, and one young woman’s messy, vibrant networks of mutual care has become a delightful Apple TV series, adapted by David E. Kelley. Elle Fanning stars as Margo, a Southern California college student who becomes pregnant and takes an unusual approach to making ends meet. (Let’s just say it involves viral dances and a lot of body paint.) Unstinting in its comedy and its humanity, the show is especially insightful about the ways that people fail and redeem each other. The dynamite cast includes Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman and Greg Kinnear.   REAL ESTATE Kain Lager-Lowe and Karina Peggau. Gabriela Campos for The New York Times The Hunt: A couple leaving the Midwest for new opportunities in Albuquerque, N.M., looked for a home that could accommodate a dog, three cats, 30 plants and 75 pounds of rocks. What did they find? Play our game. What you get for $650,000 in Portugal: A duplex in Almada. A modern apartment in Lisbon. A rowhouse in Porto. A new coat: Paint is perhaps the easiest way to change the look of a room. To find the best kind for your project, look at the SPAM: solvents, pigments, additives and materials.   LIVING Richard Hartlage’s colorful home. Miranda Estes Work in progress: A landscape designer has been adding color, personality and whimsical surprise to his Seattle home for more than 15 years, and he has no plans to stop. Achoo! Allergies can be miserable. Why does your immune system treat pollen like a parasite? Everyday influencers: The latest trend in food criticism is casual, personal reviews that seem like a conversation with a friend.   ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER 3 tips for allergy season We can’t control the budding trees and blooming flowers that set off our seasonal allergies. But we can take steps to freshen the air indoors. First, an air purifier is a simple and effective way to capture common airborne allergens, including pollen. (If you already own one, make sure to clean the prefilter monthly.) A quality bagged vacuum can also make a big difference, because it sucks dust and debris into a sealed bag that won’t blow back into your face. Finally, for dust that lingers on flat surfaces, ditch the feather duster. A damp rag or microfiber cloth will do a better job of keeping allergens from becoming airborne. — Brittney Ho   GAME OF THE WEEK Collin Morikawa teeing off on the fourth hole on Friday. Doug Mills/The New York Times The Masters. Live sports are sensory experiences, and it’s hard not to feel some jealousy when watching the Masters on a screen — how nice it must be to feel the warmth of the Georgia sun, to taste the pimento cheese sandwich that still costs just $1.50. But perhaps no sporting event translates senses through the television as well as the Masters does. This weekend, if you’ve got it on, crank the volume, close your eyes and let yourself be whisked away: the birdsong and the whispered commentary and the soft thwack of a seven iron, all deliciously clear over the strictly enforced silence of the gallery. Or, if golf A.S.M.R. isn’t your thing, open your eyes and get lost in the sea of green fairways, so verdant it’s hard to believe they’re real. The latest: Rory McIlroy, last year’s champion, holds a six-shot lead over the field. Even the usual final-round drama might not be enough to stop him. Today and tomorrow, 2 p.m. Eastern on CBS   NOW TIME TO PLAY Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was oxidizing. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

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April 12, 2026

Good morning. After 21 hours of negotiations, the United States and Iran failed to agree to a peace deal. We have more on that below.

But first, a study found that some people in vegetative states may have more awareness than we thought.

Tabitha Williams kisses her husband, Aaron Williams. Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times

A wake-up

	By Adam B. Kushner I’m the editor of this newsletter.

Let’s say something bad happens — a crash, a fall, a stroke, an overdose. Your brain absorbs a violent shock or a period without oxygen. But your heart still beats and your lungs still heave. Now you’re unconscious in the hospital, unable to respond when your spouse calls your name or your doctor prods you with a reflex hammer.

For years, these patients were said to be in a “persistent vegetative state”: bodies without minds. They idle, mostly in care centers and nursing homes, with little attention. But new research shows that many such patients — tens of thousands of Americans — may actually be hearing and thinking. That is the (somewhat horrifying) subject of Katie Engelhart’s new article for The Times Magazine. I asked her about it.

Adam: Now we know that some people declared vegetative can actually perceive and understand things around them. How many people are we talking about?

Katie: Nobody is counting. By some estimates, around 50,000 Americans are in a chronic vegetative state, meaning that they are technically awake, but have no awareness of what is going on around them. Another 200,000 to 400,000 are in a “minimally conscious state,” with fleeting periods of awareness. Research suggests that about a quarter of all these patients are able to follow commands like, “Imagine opening and closing your hand.”

How did researchers figure out that this set of patients was conscious?

Back in 2006, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University put a 23-year-old woman, who had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, into an fMRI scanner and asked her to “imagine playing tennis.” And she did! The area that controls motor planning in her brain lit up in just the same way that a healthy person’s brain would. The phenomenon was widely replicated.

The scary thing is that it doesn’t seem like there’s any way for ordinary patients to get tested for this awareness.

Exactly. Researchers have been able to find covertly conscious patients for 20 years, but the testing is almost exclusively done through research trials. I interviewed many people whose loved ones had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state — and whose doctors never even raised the possibility of covert consciousness. But family members are doing their own research, and they want access to the cutting-edge science.

If you had a loved one who was unresponsive and breathing through a ventilator, what would you do?

Unless I were in Boston or London, Ontario, where they test patients at a few I.C.U.s, I wouldn’t know if he were covertly conscious. So I would speak to him as if he were aware.

Doctors tend to discourage people who think a vegetative patient’s smile or sigh is a conscious response to them. “They don’t want to give you false hope,” says a woman you profile. But at the same time, most of these patients won’t recover, even if a few of them show signs of awareness. Are physicians changing the way they talk to families and manage expectations, given the new science?

On the one hand, numerous researchers told me about the “culture of pessimism” in American I.C.U.s: Neurologists sometimes seem quick to conclude that a brain-injured patient won’t improve — or won’t improve enough. On the other hand, what does “improvement” mean? Most people who emerge from the vegetative state end up with severely impaired consciousness and significant disabilities. For some people, that’s OK. That’s a good-enough life. For others, it’s a fate worse than death.

Most patients with locked-in syndrome — people who communicate with eye movement — say they’re happy to be alive, even with their limitations. That moved me.

That comes from a 2011 study. Amazingly, the patients who were locked in longer were even more likely to be happy. Only 7 percent of the respondents wished for euthanasia.

Read Katie’s story about how one woman dealt with the uncertainty about her husband’s consciousness.

THE LATEST NEWS

Iran Negotiations

In Islamabad, Pakistan.  Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin

Vice President JD Vance left Pakistan without a peace deal with Iran. Analysts said the issues were so complex that an agreement in one round of talks had been highly unlikely. Washington now has a few unpalatable options: A lengthy negotiation with Tehran over its nuclear program, or a resumption of a war that has already created the largest energy disruption in modern times — and the prospect of a long struggle over who controls the Strait of Hormuz. Read more about the negotiations. President Trump was watching a U.F.C. fight in Miami while the talks collapsed. In a televised address, Benjamin Netanyahu said the war would continue and sought to placate critics at home who say the war failed to achieve its goals.

Lebanon

“I’m your mother, just answer me,” Fatima Kholeif cried into her phone as she mourned two sons killed in an Israeli strike. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Our colleagues traveled to a city in southern Lebanon that Israel has been bombarding. There, they met a woman sitting on a curb clutching a phone with a photo on it. Read her story, and an excerpt below:

The photos were all she had left of her sons — the sons who had just bought her hair dye so she could color her wispy, gray curls, a respite from the Israeli bombing. The sons who had kissed her cheeks that morning as they left for work harvesting oranges in an orchard nearby. The sons who were killed on that orchard in an airstrike.

Hungary

Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his wife, Aniko Levai, voting. Bernadett Szabo/Reuters

Hungarians are voting for a new Parliament. The election — which will determine if the nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party stays in power — could have implications for the future of the E.U.’s vision of liberal democracy. Polls suggest that Orban will lose, but his party has tweaked the electoral system to his advantage. Gerrymandering could still help give his party enough seats to form a new government.

Moon Mission

In Houston. Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Artemis II crew reunited with their families in Houston after their 10-day journey around the moon. The mission reminded all of us for just a few days how small we are.

Other Big Stories

The Trump administration fired two immigration judges who had blocked the deportation of international students who supported Palestinians. A stampede at a popular tourist destination in Haiti killed at least 30 people, officials estimated. Rain seemed to cause chaos at the entrance.

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Changes to the N.C.A.A.’s transfer rules allow college athletes to switch teams as often as they wish. This month, Michigan won a men’s basketball title with an all-transfer starting lineup, and Trump signed an executive order trying to limit transfers.

How is this new era affecting college sports? We sought out opinion articles from student journalists, who have seen these changes up close.

It’s bad for fans, writes Bethany Mann in The Battalion of Texas A&M University. “When people transfer every year, it’s hard to keep track of the players, loosening the ties between the fans and the team,” Mann writes. “If there are players consistently moving in and out every year, fans have no one to cling to in hopes of a winning season.”

It’s good for athletes, writes Serena Thiede in The Times-Delphic of Drake University. “It creates possibilities for athletes to follow their dreams,” Thiede writes, adding, “It also challenges the decade-long tradition of staying at a struggling school despite coaching changes, team issues or overall program cuts.”

FROM OPINION

The United States is on the cusp of a humiliating strategic defeat in its war with Iran, the editorial board writes.

Here are columns by Michelle Goldberg on Hungary’s election and Ross Douthat on Washington’s foreign policy failure in the Middle East.

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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

Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Stealing a subway: Meet the vandals who want to break into the operator’s booth, fool around with the control panel — and maybe take a quick joyride.

A taste of your own medicine: More doctors are learning how to cook and use food as a tool for treating patients.

SPORTS

Golf: Rory McIlroy surrendered a record six-shot, 36-hole lead in the third round of the Masters. He shares a lead with Cameron Young, and they will begin the final round today at 11 under.

Hockey: The Denver Pioneers are national champions for the third time in five years after defeating Wisconsin 2-1 in Las Vegas.

Boxing: Tyson Fury beat Arslanbek Makhmudov in 12 rounds. Fury won his first bout after 16 months out of the ring after back-to-back losses to Oleksandr Usyk.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

	By Elisabeth Egan

“London Falling” by Patrick Radden Keefe: In 2023, Keefe, a writer for The New Yorker, was in England working on the television adaptation of his book “Say Nothing,” when he struck up a conversation with a stranger who told him about the mysterious death of a 19-year-old Londoner named Zac Brettler. The status-obsessed teen — who’d been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch — fell from the fifth-floor balcony of a riverfront apartment after spending time with two shady older men. There were many confounding aspects of the story, yet Scotland Yard’s response seemed sluggish to the point of disinterest. Keefe began his own investigation, one that took him from the depths of a criminal underworld to the heights of parental devotion. “He is a master builder of intricate narratives, arranging the many pieces just so,” our critic wrote in her review. “‘London Falling’ suggests that Zac’s story is ultimately a crime story, in a city so warped by money that it’s losing its bearings.”

The Times has a new profile of Keefe, “one of the last household names in nonfiction at a time when the entire future of the enterprise — writing — is up in the air.”

THE INTERVIEW

Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

	By David Marchese

This week’s subject for The Interview is the divisive former “Girls” star Lena Dunham. Her new project is “Famesick,” a highly anticipated and extremely revealing memoir due out this week.

At the beginning of the book, you write about your name and how it started to carry negative connotations. For you, not even for other people. What did your name represent?

Myopic millennial thinking or hapless feminism or man-hating or liberal twit-dom or —

It’s a long list!

It’s a long list, and there were people who maybe shared my politics and my lifestyle but were irritated that I was talking. I remember, and this is not in the book, I was going to vote with my father. I’d been campaigning for Obama. It was 2012. And he said, “I don’t know if I want to go vote with Lena Dunham.” I was like, My father feels like going to vote with me is going to signal something. He’s like, “I don’t want to go and have it be a whole thing.” That’s your father. Who’s like my best friend in the whole world. But he was saying, basically, Can you go around the block and vote on your own? That was the moment when I understood something’s going on here. “Girls” had only been on the air for six months at that point.

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 …

Blast that unsightly stain with one of these jack-of-all-trades spot cleaners.

Cultivate the green space of your dreams with these tips for starting a garden. (Hint: It’s all in the soil.)

MEAL PLAN

Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist; Hadas Smirnoff. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgepeth.

Days can get easily overrun with emails, spreadsheets and “circling back.” So Mia Leimkuhler at NYT Cooking has some classic recipes that can inject a satisfying dose of cooking creativity into your week. Maybe one is already a favorite of yours (hello, Sam Sifton’s oven-roasted chicken shawarma); maybe you’ll find something new that catches your eye and your appetite, like caramelized cabbage and walnut pasta. Get all of the recipes here.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were delight, delighted, highlighted and lighted.

Can you put eight historical events — including Leonardo da Vinci, the eruption of Krakatoa and the creation of Play-Doh — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

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April 13, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. The far right suffered a blow yesterday: Viktor Orban, a beacon for populists around the world, conceded defeat in Hungary’s general election. It was also a loss for President Trump, who had backed Orban.

Oil is now more than $100 a barrel, after Trump promised to blockade Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz.

He also attacked Pope Leo as being “weak on crime.” The pope, who has criticized the war in Iran, said he wasn’t afraid of Trump.

And Lauren Sánchez Bezos just wants to be happy. We’ll tell you about all of that and more. But first, you had some questions for us.

In the Strait of Hormuz.  Reuters

Your news questions

It’s a journalist’s job to ask questions. And it’s a great job. But it’s not as if any of us here at The Times have cornered the market on curiosity. Subscribers to The Morning have questions, too — this week about mail-in ballots, oil in the Middle East, manufacturing jobs and more. We took them to expert beat reporters for answers.

And we’ll keep doing so. Have a news question for us? Submit it here.

I live in a state where people can vote by mail, and I wonder how the president’s executive order — trying to limit such ballots — may affect our upcoming elections. | Laura Young, Portland, Oregon

Nick Corasaniti, who covers elections, writes:

Well, the president has no explicit constitutional authority over elections, and aspects of the order appear difficult to enforce. Legal experts expect courts to block large parts of it. Two issues are likelier to affect mail voting this year: a looming Supreme Court decision on late-arriving ballots and budget changes at the Postal Service. Many election officials, as well as the Postal Service, recommend that voters send their ballots at least one week before Election Day.

The Persian Gulf countries are struggling to export their oil because Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz. Why don’t they just build an oil pipeline across Saudi Arabia? | Will Karlin, Denver, Colorado

Vivian Nereim, the Gulf bureau chief, writes:

Saudi Arabia actually did build an oil pipeline to bypass the strait, decades ago, to prepare for a moment like this. It was transporting up to seven million barrels per day of oil — until it was bombed during the Iran war, reducing its capacity by around 10 percent. The vulnerability of pipelines is one reason that this one isn’t a cure-all. Another is that the six Gulf countries are economic competitors that often have tense political relationships; the Gulf countries are not always inclined to share. So a cross-border project would be a tall order.

What happened to all of the people that ICE deported to countries — not the ones they came from — with jails that torture inmates? | Gail Mielziner, St. Louis, Missouri

A prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador. Fred Ramos for The New York Times

Eileen Sullivan, who covers the federal government, writes:

It is not always clear, and the Trump administration has said it has no duty to follow up on them once they leave U.S. custody. I wrote about their fortunes here. Some are captives — in jails or even decrepit hotels — in places like Cameroon, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini and Rwanda; others, like Cubans deported to Mexico, are struggling to find adequate living situations. Some migrants were sent back to their home countries (Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone, and others) and are now in hiding because they fear for their lives. Lawyers have lost contact with the deportees who are still in South Sudan.

Who pays for the electricity that A.I. data centers use? | Beatrice Reiss, Yakima, Washington

A data center built by OpenAI and Oracle in Abilene, Texas. Scott Ball for The New York Times

Brad Plumer, who covers energy policy, writes:

It varies by location. Utilities may have to invest in new power plants and transmission lines to serve new data centers. They can pass some of those costs on to other customers in the form of higher electricity bills, which is wildly unpopular. Many states are now trying to get tech companies to shoulder more of the costs themselves.

Are manufacturing jobs coming back, as Donald Trump said they would when he ran for office? | Amy Richards, Mission, Kansas

Alan Rappeport, who covers economic policy, writes:

On “Liberation Day” a year ago, President Trump said that his sweeping global tariffs would bring jobs and factories “roaring back” to the United States. But manufacturing employment continues to decline, and more than 80,000 of those jobs have been lost since he took office. That’s because the tariffs impose additional costs on domestic producers that rely on imports to make their goods, so it’s harder for them to expand and hire. The administration also noted this month that manufacturing wages and labor productivity are both rising — tech advances mean factories need fewer people to do the same work. Both things make it harder to hire.

THE LATEST NEWS

Hungary

Prime Minister Viktor Orban Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Orban’s loss was a blow to right-wing populism globally: Hungary’s parliamentary election was seen as a showdown between friends and foes of liberal democracy. The White House and the Kremlin wanted Orban to win. Many E.U. leaders did not; he often antagonizes them. His loss could reshape the war in Ukraine. Orban gave a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in Budapest. He congratulated the opposition, but he also made a vow: “We are not giving up. Never, never, never.” Peter Magyar, the leader of the main opposition party, is expected to become Hungary’s prime minister. Read more about him.

Middle East

Oil prices surged and stocks fell today after the U.S. said it would block ships entering or exiting Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices may not drop before the midterms. Israel attacked Lebanon again after the U.S. and Iran failed to reach a peace deal. Israeli and Lebanese officials plan to meet for rare talks in Washington this week. Trump said the U.S. military would begin destroying mines that Iran had placed underwater in the Strait. Pakistan is trying to bring the U.S. and Iran back into negotiation.

The Pope

Pope Leo XIV Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

Trump attacked Pope Leo, who is a powerful and outspoken critic of the war in Iran. “I’m not a big fan,” Trump said. Leo said he wasn’t afraid of “speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.”

Leo is traveling to Africa, where his church is growing fast. He will visit Algeria, Angola, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea and will likely address the issue of polygamy.

Eric Swalwell

Representative Eric Swalwell of California. Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Swalwell, a democratic congressman from California, suspended his campaign to become governor of the state. He is under criminal investigation after allegations that he sexually assaulted a former staff member and engaged in sexual misconduct with other women. He said he was “deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,” but promised to fight what he called “false allegations.” Democrats had backed him, but they quickly abandoned him.

Around the World

An autonomous vehicle in a factory outside Columbus, Ohio. Kristian Thacker for The New York Times

China: The country is in an arms race with the U.S. over A.I.-backed autonomous weapons, including drones that strike without human command. Peru: 35 candidates were on the ballot for a presidential election yesterday. Officials extended voting in parts of Lima after logistical failures. Cuba: The president described himself as open to dialogue with the U.S. South Korea: The emergency-care system is buckling because of a shortage of doctors. Sometimes, ambulances have had to call over 20 hospitals before finding a bed for a patient.

OPINIONS

Parents are doing too much for their kids, Rachel Feintzeig argues: “I dream of the day we can all take it down a notch without shame.”

Democrats should seek to understand, not push away, Hasan Piker, the popular (and sometimes controversial) left-wing commentator, Ezra Klein writes.

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Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.

MORNING READS

At Coachella. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella

Bieberchella: Justin Bieber headlined Coachella with a nostalgic set — he played videos of himself as a child singing, and harmonized with them live. Watch one song.

Lauren Sánchez Bezos: In a profile, we found out she drinks her morning coffee from a mug that says “Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again.” See inside her life.

Your pick: You all wanted to know about the best spot cleaner yesterday.

Metropolitan Diary: A bird of prey in Morningside Park.

Lives Lived: Asha Bhosle, whose voice was the soundtrack for generations of Bollywood films, has died at 92.

TODAY’S NUMBER

15

— That is the rough percentage increase in U.S. traffic fatalities on days when albums drop from major pop stars like Taylor Swift, according to a new study. Why?

SPORTS

Rory McIlroy Hector Vivas/Getty Images

Golf: Rory McIlroy won the Masters for the second year in a row. He beat Scottie Scheffler by a stroke.

N.B.A.: Doc Rivers agreed to step down as the Milwaukee Bucks’ head coach.

M.L.B.: Phil Garner, who won a World Series as a Pittsburgh Pirates player in 1979 and managed the Houston Astros to their first World Series appearance in 2005, has died at 76.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I’m not generally bossy about what kind of pasta you cook. But for Melissa Clark’s seasonally effective recipe for pasta primavera with asparagus and peas, a soft, fresh egg number is best — the kind you’ll find in the refrigerated aisle of the supermarket. Its chewiness is a perfect foil for the vegetables, cooked just to the edge of softness. Melissa adds crème fraîche at the end, with a handful of finely chopped parsley. And, because she’s fancy, she adds finely chopped tarragon, too. Do that yourself. Fancy suits us this year.

A JUMP ROPE QUEEN

Cassandra Giraldo for The New York Times

Annie Judis, 82, holds the Guinness World Record for oldest competitive rope skipper. She shares her daily workouts with some 187,000 Instagram followers. A former Playboy centerfold and veteran of Hollywood sitcoms, she told The Times she now sees her life’s purpose as defying expectations of what bodies can do — and look like — into their 80s and beyond. “That rope saved my life,” she said.

More on culture: “Euphoria” returned to television last night after a four-year hiatus. The Times talked to the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, about its journey so far. Levinson is, Joe Coscarelli writes, “the kind of auteur who sees the licking flames of chaos and only wants to lean closer.”

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Clockwise from left: Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England; Photo by Hufton and Crow; Sir John Soane's Museum; Photo by Gareth Gardner; Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images

Explore London through the eyes of our art critic Jason Farago. He’s selected his five favorite places to see art there.

Eat a French toast bagel — it’s a slightly sweet, cinnamon-scented egg number that’s become a minor player in New York’s cutthroat bagel scene. Get it toasted, with salted butter and strawberry jam. Objection OVERRULED.

Stop buying stuff you don’t need.

Take our news quiz.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was nonchalance.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam

Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

[phkrause]

April 14, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. The two most powerful Americans in the world — the pope and the president — are clashing.

In Algiers. Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

President vs. pope

Pope Leo’s visit to Algeria today was meant to be stirring. The first member of the Order of Augustine to ascend to the papacy is visiting the place where Augustine was bishop starting in A.D. 395.

Instead, President Trump is hammering him.

Leo doesn’t like to see war in the Middle East. Trump doesn’t like other leaders criticizing him, even implicitly. After he called the pope “weak on crime” and posted an A.I. image of himself as a Jesus-like figure, he said, “I’m just responding to Pope Leo.”

The pontiff seemed unfazed. (“Too many innocent people are being killed,” he said on his way to a 10-day Africa tour. “Someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way.”) But Catholic clerics in America called on Trump to apologize. He declined.

It’s an odd conflict. The people in these two roles have generally treated each other with deference, or pretended to. What gives?

A curious tableau

Trump’s A.I. answer to Pope Leo. via Truth Social

This image Trump posted, then deleted, was especially strange, and not only because the patient in it bears a resemblance to Jon Stewart, as the late night hosts pointed out.

I asked Jason Farago, our art critic, about it:

The image — do not call it a painting — is like other works of propaganda during this second term: the ideology of Leni Riefenstahl expressed in the style of Lisa Frank. The incumbent appears as Christ the Healer. Supplicants, or their disembodied heads, ring the messiah-president like the saints and donors in an early Renaissance altarpiece; note the grizzled veteran at left, whose cap has nonsense A.I. lettering more Cyrillic than Roman.

When he took down the image, Trump said he hadn’t meant to compare himself to Jesus. “I thought it was me as a doctor,” he said.

Popes and politics

Lots of popes have waded into the political muck, as my colleague Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Rome.

Pope Francis, who died last year, hated poverty and climate change. He was also more compassionate about migration and homosexuality than his predecessors. In 1979, John Paul II, the first Polish pope, told students in Krakow: Don’t be afraid to reject totalitarian oppression. It took 10 more years for communism there to fall. Pius XII is remembered for what he didn’t say: As the pope during World War II, he avoided explicitly condemning the Nazis.

A question of stability

Where is all this rancor from the president coming from? Peter Baker, who has covered six presidencies, wrote about that yesterday:

Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.

It’s a debate you can see in the polls. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found that 61 percent of Americans think Trump has become more erratic with age. Just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges.” That’s down from 54 percent in 2023.

Trump’s language fuels the fire. “He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact,” Peter writes:

He wanders off into odd tangents — an eight-minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru, a long digression during a cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and more than once boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Azerbaijan, two countries separated by nearly 4,000 miles. (He evidently means Armenia and Azerbaijan).

Still, part of Trump’s base loves it. A Princeton historian put this question to Peter: “What can be more anti-establishment than someone who is willing to be out of control?”

THE LATEST NEWS

War in Iran

A billboard in Iran showing the Strait of Hormuz, saying “Forever in Iran’s hands.” Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

The U.S. and Iran are trading proposals on nuclear restrictions. Iran said it could suspend its uranium enrichment for up to five years, but the Trump administration insisted on 20 years, officials from both countries said. A deal on those lines would buy time, but it wouldn’t solve deeper problems, my colleagues David Sanger and Tyler Pager write. Officials also said they were discussing a second round of face-to-face talks. Since the U.S. has announced a blockade of Iranian ports on the Strait of Hormuz, several ships coming from Iran have still been able to cross the strait. There’s little precedent for such a blockade, and the military has offered few details about its plan. John Ismay, a former naval officer, explains how it might work. Many Americans have expressed bewilderment about a conflict that came with little warning.

Congress

Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman from the San Francisco Bay Area, said he’ll resign after allegations that he sexually assaulted a former staff member and engaged in misconduct with other women. He suspended his campaign to be California governor yesterday. Tony Gonzales, a Republican congressman from Texas accused of having a coercive sexual relationship with a staff member who later killed herself, said he would resign as well.

More on Politics

In California, Democrats are struggling to identify the right candidate for governor. Here are the candidates still running. Prosecutors are investigating ICE agents who in January arrested a Minnesota man in his underwear. (Images of the arrest went viral on social media.)

A federal judge dismissed Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over its report of his lewd birthday greeting to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has said the message was not his.

Around the World

A pier on the Irrawaddy River, looking out toward Yangon, Myanmar.  Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

Myanmar: Five years into a civil war, fear consumes everyday life. A reporter and a photographer for The Times traveled the country and found a population terrified of one another, and of the next attack. Hungary: Viktor Orban’s election defeat ends his run as Europe’s pre-eminent populist leader. Many Hungarians rejoiced, but U.S. members of the MAGA movement were worried. Canada: Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has governed for a year without a Commons majority, now has one after three special parliamentary elections. China: Beijing has enacted sweeping regulations to investigate and punish foreign companies that stop using Chinese suppliers.

OPINIONS

Looking to pay less than $20,000 for a car? Good luck. Clifford Winston explains how cars got so expensive.

The U.S. has helped fix crises around the world. Sudan needs help now, Ann Curry writes.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

Chimpanzees in Uganda. Aaron Sandel

Going ape: These chimps began a bloody “civil war” that has continued for years. No one knows why.

Extra syrup: Chains like Dunkin’ and Starbucks already sell more cold drinks than hot ones. Now McDonald’s is introducing fruit-flavored refresher drinks.

Two-button rule: Men are generally advised to leave open the bottom button of their suits. Why?

Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about Lauren Sánchez Bezos.

Insect carwash: A unique “choreography” between two ant species suggests a partnership in which one cleans the other.

TODAY’S NUMBER

90

— That is the number of seconds it takes the massive, revolving, two-story set of “Innocence” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York to transform, as if in a series of magic tricks, from a fancy restaurant into a school cafeteria and classroom. The size of the team that makes that possible is astonishing. Look at the pictures.

SPORTS

W.N.B.A.: The Dallas Wings selected UConn guard Azzi Fudd with the No. 1 pick in the draft, reuniting her with former Huskies teammate Paige Bueckers, the top pick in 2025.

College basketball: ESPN broadcaster Dick Vitale, 86, who has battled multiple forms of cancer, announced that he has been diagnosed with melanoma.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Linda Xiao for The New York Times

Eric Kim’s from Atlanta, where lemon-pepper chicken wings emerged, and his recipe for them is legitimate. I cook them a little differently, though. I make a mixture of lemon pepper, cornstarch and kosher salt, then swirl some neutral oil into it to make a kind of slurry. I toss my wings in that before roasting them on a rack in a sheet pan, which gives the chicken a shatteringly crisp crust. Then I toss them in butter, hot sauce and more lemon pepper, as if they were Buffalo wings. In Atlanta, they call that lemon pepper wet. With enough celery and carrot and ranch dressing, it makes for a lovely, messy weeknight dinner.

THE AMOEBA

Jake Michaels for The New York Times

Michael Kimmelman, our architecture critic, took measure of the new $724 million home for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, called the David Geffen Galleries for the donor who gave $150 million to the cause. Kimmelman calls the building “spectacular”:

By turns uplifting, lyrical and pugnacious, the new Geffen Galleries bid to alter the cultural and civic weather of Los Angeles and reassert the city’s role as an American petri dish for experimental design and derring-do.

The museum opens to the public on May 4. “I expect it will be wildly popular,” Michael said. Read his whole review.

More on culture

Oasis, Phil Collins and Sade will enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, alongside Billy Idol, Iron Maiden and Wu-Tang Clan. Who failed to make the cut? Among others: Jeff Buckley, Mariah Carey and Melissa Etheridge. “Comebacks require landing places,” writes Jon Caramanica, our pop music critic, about the return of the rapper once known as Kanye West. “For almost his whole career, Ye has been tempting fate with a combination of alienating people and wooing them right back. But in this moment, his ability to do both at once is more brittle than ever.” Influencers tried begging and manifesting to get someone to pay their way to see Justin Bieber perform at Coachella.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

David Cross Ye Fan for The New York Times

Spend a day with the comedian David Cross. People in show business who aren’t global superstars lead interesting lives.

Step up your body-weight workout — literally.

Watch Stephen Colbert riff on The Morning’s conversion of the moon mission’s mileage into Dachshunds.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were outgrowth and wrought.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. If you want to see more of my colleagues’ great reporting in your Google search results, take a minute to add The Times as a preferred source. It’s easy: Just click this link. 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

[phkrause]

April 15, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. It’s tax day. I wish you many happy returns.

A tax preparation clinic in Los Angeles. Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Paying their way

Today, many undocumented immigrants are debating whether to file their taxes.

That may — or may not — come as a surprise to you. To some, undocumented immigrants are scofflaws, people who come here and leech off the system. “Many, many illegal aliens do not pay taxes,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Politico last year.

Except most do pay taxes, according to researchers. The Internal Revenue Service lets anyone file, whether they have a Social Security number or not. Undocumented workers in the United States pay roughly $20 billion in income taxes each year.

As today’s tax day loomed, many of those immigrants worried. Under the Trump administration, the I.R.S. shared some of their addresses with immigration officials — something it had never done before. They fear that federal agents might scoop them up, should they send in their tax forms.

“I don’t know if we can trust this government not to come after us,” one woman told The Times. She and her husband, also undocumented, have paid federal taxes every year for more than a decade. He described their thinking to my colleague Miriam Jordan, who covers immigration: “If one day there’s immigration reform and the chance to legalize our status, we can show that we file our taxes, are not a burden — that we do the right thing,” he said.

The Treasury will collect a lot less money if undocumented workers skip filing season this year. Many have taxes withheld in their paychecks, but more of them could take under-the-table jobs and pay no federal taxes at all. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, estimated a loss of $300 billion in tax revenue over a decade.

Read more about feeling caught between the desire to do right and the fear of deportation.

Nice returns

Plenty of taxpayers who are in the country legally, though, are starting to benefit from the tax cut that Republicans passed last year, reports Andrew Duehren, who covers tax policy. He spoke with more than three dozen taxpayers about that, up and down the income ladder.

Many told him they had received their largest refund in years, allowing them to pay down debt, save more or cover the cost of a vacation or a new bed. That was true of higher earners especially. “I thought it could be five figures, but it was still a little more, and a welcome surprise,” one told Andrew.

Those at the other end of the scale sometimes saw little to no benefit. “Now we’re going to have to figure out where to tighten up in other areas so we can get that money a different way,” a scheduling manager at a home improvement company told Andrew. She had thought her refund would allow her to put money toward a car to replace her 2006 Acura. It did not.

But even breaking even can feel like a win. Nicole Mendoza, 68, a waitress at a Cracker Barrel in Canton, Ga., told Andrew she earned about $38,000 last year and paid $551 in federal income taxes. “I got back every penny,” Mendoza said.

A slog

Filing taxes is one of those rare activities that everyone hates. (I loathe it so much that I don’t even know if my family has filed this year. That’s my wife’s game. I have different responsibilities.) My colleague Evan Gorelick breaks down just how painful it is, in relative terms:

The Treasury Department estimates that 169 million Americans file individual income tax returns every year. On average, each respondent spends about 12 hours and 37 minutes on them. That translates to more than 2.1 billion total hours. If you volunteered to file everyone’s returns, it would take you around 243,000 sleepless years. To make today’s deadline, you would need to have started during a prehistoric ice age, before Homo sapiens wore clothes. (The world was populated by woolly mammoths and beavers the size of bears.) If Americans spent that time on other things, they could generate an extra $94 billion per year, according to Treasury data. That’s almost triple the G.D.P. of Iceland and more than Trump’s tariffs have lawfully raised in revenue so far, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

THE LATEST NEWS

War in the Middle East

The U.S. military said it had blockaded Iranian ports. Israeli and Lebanese officials met in Washington and, according to the U.S., agreed to more peace talks. The war is straining U.S. relations with China. In a thinly veiled critique, Xi Jinping said the world could not risk reverting “to the law of the jungle.”

The war has also upended the global economy, the International Monetary Fund said, warning that more inflation could follow.

Low-income and developing countries will bear much of that pain, economists say. Big banks in the U.S. are reporting strong profits, and the stock market closed near a high.

The Pope

JD Vance Alyssa Pointer/Reuters

Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, said Pope Leo should be more careful when talking about theology. He took issue with Leo’s criticism of the war in Iran. Trump’s criticism of the pope could complicate the midterms. Republicans are counting on Catholics’ votes to maintain control of Congress. Leo is in Cameroon as part of a papal trip to Africa, where Catholicism is growing fast.

More on Politics

Lonna Drewes with her attorney Lisa Bloom. Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

Another woman accused Representative Eric Swalwell of sexual assault, saying he raped her in a hotel room in 2018. Swalwell’s lawyer denied the accusation. The abrupt resignations of Swalwell, who is a California Democrat, and a Texas Republican, Tony Gonzales, have started another scramble between their states for seats in the House. Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, wants to tax people with second homes in New York City that are worth $5 million or more.

Around the World

Manama, Bahrain’s capital. Reuters

Bahrain: A man accused of spying for Iran died while in custody. His body was returned to his family bearing injuries that suggest he was tortured, people who viewed it say. Hungary: Peter Magyar was a loyal ally of Viktor Orban, the far-right Hungarian leader. Then he changed sides and beat his former boss by a landslide.

OPINIONS

The novelist Colson Whitehead says you should use A.I. for whatever you like — except one thing. “If you use it for your art, you’re a freakin’ hack.”

Here’s a column by Bret Stephens on what Trump should do next in Iran.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

It’s half a rotisserie chicken. What could it cost? Cole Saladino for The New York Times

Pricey birds: Should half a rotisserie chicken cost $40? New Yorkers can’t decide.

King of Pop: A biopic is the latest move by the Michael Jackson estate to rehabilitate his public image.

A higher education crisis: Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts, will permanently shutter. It’s part of an epidemic of college closures.

Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about the two-button rule for suits.

TODAY’S NUMBER

100

— That is the age Route 66 is turning this year. The road runs for roughly 2,400 miles, from Chicago to Los Angeles, and helped define the American road trip. Read why John Steinbeck called it “the mother road, the road of flight.”

SPORTS

N.B.A.: LaMelo Ball scored a layup with 4.7 seconds remaining to give the Charlotte Hornets a 127-126 overtime win over the Miami Heat.

N.F.L. The Athletic’s senior N.F.L. reporter, Dianna Russini, resigned a week after photographs emerged of her holding hands with and embracing Mike Vrabel, head coach of the New England Patriots.

Soccer: New Jersey and Massachusetts are hiking prices for fans traveling to World Cup games. NJ Transit plans to charge more than $100 for return rail tickets from New York’s Pennsylvania Station to MetLife Stadium, and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority will charge $95 a seat on a bus service to and from Gillette Stadium.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Elaine’s was an Upper East Side saloon that Elaine Kaufman, its owner, maintained as a kind of club for writers, cops, movie stars, entrepreneurs, politicians and other members of New York’s power elite. The place was never known for its food, but the fettuccine Alfredo there was excellent, even if Italians may blanch at the cup and a half of heavy cream that gives the dish its heft. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a fan.

COLLECTIVE SOUL

A house being built in Altadena, Calif.  Carlos Jaramillo for The New York Times

The fires that swept through Los Angeles last year incinerated more than 16,000 homes. As residents rebuild, writes Sam Lubell, who has been covering the fires and their impact, they’re banding together to keep costs down — and to innovate:

What’s unfolding across the fire zones of the city is a wide field of experimentation not seen since California attempted to reinvent the single-family house after World War II, a time when the United States was facing a severe housing shortage.

The renderings of what could come next — simple but soulful houses built at a fraction of the cost of custom homes — are impressive. Check them out.

More on culture

Billy Crystal lost his house in the Los Angeles fires. This fall, he’ll return to Broadway with a solo show reflecting on that experience. The Danish writer Solvej Balle is six books into a seven-volume maxi-novel, “On the Calculation of Volume,” in which the protagonist lives through the same calendar day every day — nearly 10 years’ worth of Nov. 18s so far. The protagonist now has peers — other rootless Novembrists — and that makes the days complicated, A.O. Scott writes in his review of the fourth book, the latest to be published in English.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Lena Dunham OK McCausland for The New York Times

Read “Famesick,” Lena Dunham’s new memoir of life on the celebrity hamster wheel. “It has a whiff of the old Hollywood tell-all, indie edition, with trash bags for curtains in an Eagle Rock group house,” writes Alexandra Jacobs.

Get help, my dudes. Psychologists told The Times that men are less likely to seek mental-health care than women. Here’s what they want you to know.

Clean your outside world with the best electric pressure washer tested by the finicky property managers at Wirecutter. (I use mine as often as I loan it out to friends — we’re spraying everything.)

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was celibacy.

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

[phkrause]

April 16, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. The war in Sudan has entered its fourth year. It is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

Before we get to that, though, I wanted to share a few stories I think you should know about — and answer your question about what astronauts got paid to fly by the moon.

Construction of the White House ballroom project last month. Eric Lee for The New York Times

For your safety

Why do we need a $400 million White House ballroom? Why must the United States stop the construction of offshore wind turbines? Why did President Trump strip hundreds and thousands of federal workers of union protections last year?

In each case, the Trump administration has said it’s a matter of national security, report my colleagues Maxine Joselow and Devlin Barrett.

Experts say some of the arguments strain credulity. The ballroom will have a bunker underneath (but there was already one under the East Wing that Trump demolished). The windmills supposedly interfere with radar off the Northeast coast (military analysts say that’s not true). Collective bargaining is said to hamper the work of government employees focused on national security issues.

Judges have raised their eyebrows at some of these claims, though the law gives the president wide latitude on national security matters. (Adam Kushner, my editor, wrote about what happens when judges don’t believe the president.)

One legal test will pit Trump’s national security arguments against the Endangered Species Act. The government last month exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from federal protections for endangered whales, saying the rules had hindered oil production there. “To be as secure as a nation, we need a steady, affordable supply of our own energy,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Richard Borge

What A.I. can’t do

Artificial intelligence has sped up a lot of tasks at the office, reports Noam Scheiber, who covers the plight of white-collar workers. In some cases A.I. just does the tasks outright. (That’s the plight.)

But what A.I. can’t do — at least for the moment — is take a meeting:

As A.I. makes the production of knowledge work more and more efficient, the job of presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring or just plain selling the work appears to be rising in importance. And the need for those sometimes messy human tasks may limit the number of people A.I. displaces.

“These were always important skills,” said David Deming, an economist who is the dean of Harvard College. “But as the information landscape becomes more saturated, the ability to tell a story out of it — to take a ton of text and turn it into something people want — is more valuable.”

Noam spoke to a number of executives who feel the same way. I particularly liked his interaction with a consultant who had historically relied on experts (in, say, tax law or coding). The consultant told him A.I. was reducing the need for that expertise and increasing the value of generalists who excel at the complex business of dealing with clients. What he needs now are people “who have their phone glued to their head, who are everybody’s best friend, who are go-go-go.”

Take a moment to think about that — ideally during a meeting you hate. It could save your job!

Related: Stop debating whether A.I. is smarter than humans. It has “jagged intelligence”: brilliance in some areas, incompetence in others.

Peter Arkle

Here’s to dense dogs

Is your dog smart? One of mine is as dumb as a box of rocks. The other’s about 7 cents short of a dollar. (I love them both.) Yet many people, my colleague Emily Anthes reports, have dogs of exceptional intellect. Or so they think.

Earlier this year, Emily wrote about “canine prodigies” that know the names for dozens, even hundreds, of different toys. Afterward, she heard from many readers who said that their dogs were lexical masterminds, too.

She realized she was experiencing what scientists call the better-than-average effect. That’s a cognitive bias in which people overestimate their own abilities — and their dogs’ abilities — in comparison with those of other people (or dogs). A lot of people have it. In a 2025 YouGov survey, two-thirds of dog owners said that their animals were smarter than the average dog. It’s statistically impossible.

And that’s just fine. Watson, Emily’s dog, isn’t a genius. But he is “everything we could want in a dog: sweet, gentle, goofy, loving. I don’t need him to help me with the crossword — I just want him to curl up next to me while I do it. And at this, he excels.”

Read Emily’s paean to a very good boy.

Now let’s see what else is happening in the world.

THE LATEST NEWS

War in the Middle East

In Tyre, Lebanon. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Israel is considering a short-term cease-fire in its war against the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, officials from both countries say. Pakistan said it expected to host a second round of peace negotiations between the United States and Iran but declined to give a date. The U.S. blockade in the Strait of Hormuz appears to be working: No Iranian-linked ships have been seen leaving since it took effect, officials and vessel-tracking firms say. But more ships have been trying to avoid detection in and around the strait, experts say. While not directly involved in the war, China has a lot at stake. In the video below, David Sanger explains. Click to watch.

The New York Times

The Pope

Catholics bishops defended Pope Leo after Vice President JD Vance suggested he be more “careful” talking about theology. Trump’s comments about Leo have threatened his friendship with Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

War in Sudan

A 2-month-old, Saidal Altaher, getting treatment for malnutrition in Port Sudan. Bernat Armangue/Associated Press

The war in Sudan, between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, is stretching into a fourth year. The conflict is the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis. Millions of Sudanese people have fled their homes and much of the population of about 50 million is not getting enough to eat. Read more about the war.

Other Big Stories

Trump vowed to fire Jerome Powell if he doesn’t quit the Federal Reserve after his term as chair ends next month. He could stay as a governor until 2028. Public trust in higher education is plunging, and a Yale report suggests that colleges and universities should bear a significant part of the blame. A poll found a sharp rise in the share of men under 30 who declare religion “very important” to them. The latest figure, from 2025, was 42 percent, up from 28 percent two years earlier.

ASK THE MORNING

How much does an astronaut get paid to go to the moon? | Diane Young | Ipswich, Massachusetts

Kenneth Chang, who covers NASA and the solar system, writes:

They don’t get paid extra for long-distance travel. It’s their job. They earn the same salary whether they’re on Earth or in space. They also don’t get extra pay for overtime or holidays and weekends. In 2024, the average salary for NASA astronauts was $152,258.

OPINIONS

Younger men are increasingly seeking out older women — and it’s not just a dating trend. It’s a shift in power, desire and modern masculinity, The Opinions podcast argues.

Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens discuss Trump, his supporters and Jesus.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

Braden Peters, known as Clavicular. Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times

Clavicular: The popular influencer known for “looksmaxxing,” an internet subculture obsessed with male attractiveness, was taken to a hospital after he appeared to overdose during a livestream, Vanity Fair reported. Read more about him here.

The bard: Researchers found the site of a home Shakespeare bought in London.

Your pick: The most clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about rebuilding after the L.A. wildfires.

TODAY’S NUMBER

38.4

— That’s how many millions of dollars Vivek Ramaswamy and his super PAC have raised in his race for Ohio governor, a record by a wide margin. Will this haul help this Trump ally overcome voters’ skepticism? Here’s a good look at his conundrum.

SPORTS

N.B.A.: The Philadelphia 76ers made the Eastern Conference playoffs with a 109-97 win over the Orlando Magic.

W.N.B.A.: A’ja Wilson will be the league’s highest-paid player after signing a three-year contract with the Las Vegas Aces. With maximum raises, it could reach more than $4.7 million.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Chris Simpson for The New York Times

I love the blank canvas of miso soup, which makes for a delicious light dinner on a springtime evening, even if, as my daughter was, you’re too sick to enjoy it. I like this version, adapted from one cooked by the chef Seiji Ando of the restaurant Benkay in Portland, Maine. There are whispers of sake and mirin in there to balance the salinity of the dashi and miso. Ando says you can add a pat of butter, too. I always do.

HOME ALONE

Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood. Jillian Freyer for The New York Times

Music directors — the conductors responsible for the artistic and technical aspects of orchestras — tend to have multiple gigs these days. (Klaus Mäkelä, the 30-year-old Finnish star, juggles assignments with orchestras in Oslo, Paris and Amsterdam.)

But their employers face declining audiences and budget shortfalls, and they’ve begun to regard that rootlessness with disfavor, reports Adam Nagourney, who covers classical music. Music directors should understand the communities they serve, the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic told Adam. The job is to be “both an artistic visionary and a collaborative leader.” In other words, music directors should stay put more.

More on culture

Jay McInerney is 71. His latest novel is out this week. “I’ve traded cocaine for fitness,” he told us. The second season of “Beef,” a breakout hit for Netflix, arrives tonight. This time Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan are the leads, a married couple on the edge. (Last season had Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as beefing strangers.) The actors spoke with The Times about the darkness of dark comedy.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Michelle Pfeiffer and Elle Fanning play mother and daughter in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles.” Allyson Riggs/Apple TV

Watch “Margo’s Got Money Problems,” on Apple TV, the latest in a string of shows that use OnlyFans as a plot point. James Poniewozik, our television critic, calls it “as empathetic, funny and openhearted a series about an adult performer monetizing her exposure on the internet as you might expect to see.” It stars Elle Fanning as that performer, and Michelle Pfeiffer as her mom.

File for a sleep divorce. It could reignite your sex life.

Hang your bananas, at least if you always have bananas on hand. The monkeys at Wirecutter tell us a small investment in a storage hook means they won’t spoil so quickly.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was pavement.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam

Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

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April 17, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. A 10-day cease-fire has started in Lebanon, and thousands of families are trying to head home. Let’s see if it holds. The deal is between Israel and Lebanon, and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia there, hasn’t said whether it would fully accept the truce.

There’s more news below — and an excellent recipe for chickpeas al limone.

But I’m going to start today in Washington, D.C., where President Trump wants to build a huge arch.

Marco Hernandez/The New York Times

Stand tall

A federal panel approved early designs for Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch yesterday. The decision was hardly a surprise: The committee members were all appointed by Trump. It doesn’t make the structure inevitable — a group of Vietnam veterans has already filed a lawsuit against it, and Congress might get involved — but the vote started a process that could dramatically change the skyline of the nation’s capital. The arch, and its height, are meant to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary.

The Commission of Fine Arts didn’t rubber-stamp the plan. One member suggested that it lose some lions (which are not native to the United States), the golden eagles on the viewing deck and a winged angel on top. There’ll be another vote down the line.

But the tone was largely laudatory. Before the vote, the panel’s chairman called the president’s idea “beautiful.” On the table in front of him, there was a black baseball hat reading “Make Design Great Again.”

A critic’s view

Marco Hernandez/The New York Times

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who presented the plan, said it “embodies American freedom, American unity, American strength and the American dream.”

I asked Michael Kimmelman, our architecture critic, about that. He was blunt:

If it really involves a human architect it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to someone purposefully trying to simulate A.I. slop. It’s an insult to veterans, blocking views of Arlington National Cemetery. It is what you come up with if you’re designing a monument to excess and narcissism.

Michael’s not a modernist snob. There’s nothing the matter with reviving the ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art, he told me. But “size is not the same thing as scale. Classical architecture isn’t a bunch of acanthus leaves and columns on a building.” It’s about proportion and judgment. “The expression of those principles is what conveys dignity and strength, not size and glitter,” he said.

He’s not alone. There’s been a lot of pushback on the design, including from the architecture critic who proposed it, The Times reported. And before yesterday’s vote, the panel received nearly 1,000 messages from the public. “One hundred percent of the comments were against the project,” one commissioner said.

Compare and contrast

Marco Hernandez/The New York Times

One of the inspirations for the arch is the Arc de Triomphe, the neoclassical monument in Paris that Napoleon commissioned in 1806. Trump has said the goal was “to top it by, I think, a lot.” In fact, as my colleagues report, Trump’s arch would be bigger than nearly every other monumental arch across the globe. Look at the comparisons here.

Michael remembered another ambitious triumphal arch, also meant to outdo the Arc de Triomphe: the one that Adolf Hitler planned to raise in Berlin. It would have been more than 300 feet tall, covered with the names of the nearly two million Germans who died in World War I.

In 1941, construction began. The massive concrete cylinder at the monument’s base was so heavy that it sank into Berlin’s soft, sandy soil, and the project had to be abandoned unfinished. “The idea for the arch collapsed under the weight of its own megalomania,” Michael said.

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-Lebanon

Residents of central Beirut near the site of Israeli air strikes. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, traded strikes right up to midnight last night, when the cease-fire in Lebanon took effect. But for now, the truce has halted a conflict that has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon and displaced more than a million. At least 13 Israeli soldiers have also been killed, along with two civilians, according to the Israeli authorities. Hezbollah acknowledged the announcement of the Israeli-Lebanese cease-fire but did not say whether it would abide by its terms.

On a highway in Lebanon today. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Thousands of displaced families flooded the main highway to southern Lebanon today. Many still said they feared they would have to flee again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli troops would remain in southern Lebanon, where they have seized territory.

Strait of Hormuz

The New York Times

Since the start of the war between the U.S. and Iran, both countries have fought to control the flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. These charts show how effective each side has been.

Note: Shows ship positions on April 12. Includes oil tankers, cargo ships and gas carriers, but excludes ships making routine deliveries between Gulf ports. Source: Kpler (shipping data). The New York Times

More on Iran

Stocks may have soared again, but the war in Iran has started to pinch the finances of many Americans. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth renewed U.S. threats to attack Iran’s power plants and other energy sites if its leaders did not agree to a peace deal.

Politics

The House voted early this morning to extend for 10 days an expiring law that allows surveillance without a warrant. In grueling congressional hearings, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to shift his tone on vaccines. He said measles jabs were safe and effective “for most people.” Trump picked Dr. Erica Schwartz, a Navy officer and former deputy surgeon general who supports vaccines, to be the next head of the C.D.C. The Senate voted to allow mining around Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, an expanse of federally protected lakes and forests. A Chilean company wants a copper and nickel mine there. Justin Fairfax, Virginia’s lieutenant governor from 2018 to 2022, fatally shot his wife and then himself, the police said. In their 2025 joint tax return, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, reported a combined income of roughly $145,000. That included $1,600 from his rapping and about $10,000 from her art work.

Immigration

The acting ICE director said he plans to resign. ICE agents arrested an 85-year-old French widow who married her American military sweetheart last year.

Other Big Stories

NPR said it had received two gifts totaling $113 million, and that one of them was its largest ever from a living donor. The musician known as D4vd was arrested in connection with the death of a missing teenage girl whose severely decomposed body was found in the trunk of his Tesla, the authorities said.

ASK THE MORNING

Not too long ago, a simple computer filled an entire room. Now we carry complex machines in our pockets. Is there any emerging technology that might make these huge data centers (and the cooling needed) obsolete — or much smaller? | Karen Bowen, Summerville, South Carolina

Cade Metz, who covers artificial intelligence, writes:

Not really. In fact, data centers are moving in the opposite direction, becoming even larger and more power-hungry. Companies like Google are developing new ways of cooling all this computing infrastructure with less water, but Moore’s Law — the notion that the number of transistors packed into each computer chip doubles roughly every two years, allowing computers to get smaller — does not apply in the age of artificial intelligence. A.I. is driven by a new kind of specialized chip that is needed in enormous numbers. That explains the size of these data centers. Have a look at this one from Amazon, which is only partly finished, if you want your mind blown.

OPINIONS

The Ezra Klein Show explains why Jeff Bezos’ tax rate is lower than yours.

Here’s a column by M. Gessen on a corporate war crimes prosecution in France.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

Valley View Winery in Ruch, Ore. Mason Trinca for The New York Times

Winery feud: She wanted to pry her family vineyard from her brothers. Instead, her lawyers paid the largest fine yet for passing off A.I. slop as sound legal reasoning.

Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about dumb dogs.

Rolling life: Roger Adams, who invented Heelys, died at 71.

TODAY’S NUMBER

$14,106

— That’s the median annual cost for full-time infant child care in the U.S. If you live in a city or on a coast, where care is more expensive, the figure may seem low. But it’s still a lot. Why is child care so expensive?

SPORTS

Fraud allegations: A former player on the Alabama football team has been accused of wearing wigs and makeup and posing as N.F.L. players to collect nearly $20 million in fraudulent loans.

N.B.A. playoffs: Oklahoma City is primed for a repeat, and the Knicks may fall short, John Hollinger writes. See more predictions.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Armando Rafael for The New York Times

Here’s a cool hack on a classic Italian recipe for pasta al limone — it’s chickpeas al limone. Don’t drain the beans before adding — the brine combines with lemon juice, olive oil and grated Parmesan to create a super-silky sauce. (I’d add a pat of butter, too, because I’m reckless.) Rip a ball of burrata in there at the end and scatter some torn basil leaves over the top. So good. What can’t you chickpea?

DESK DRAMA

The New York Times

Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson made their Broadway debuts this week, starring in “The Fear of 13,” about the relationship between a death-row inmate (that’s Brody) and a sympathetic prison volunteer (Thompson). Helen Shaw, our critic, found the production uneven but, hey, judge for yourself: The two actors visited our headquarters recently and performed a scene from the play. Watch.

More on culture

Baby Keem is Kendrick Lamar’s cousin and protégé, but he says he tended the roots of his autobiographical album, “Casino,” all by himself, in Las Vegas, where he was raised. “There’s curiosity to my story,” he told The Times. “People have these opinions on how I came about.” The influencer known as Clavicular, who was treated after an apparent overdose, left a hospital and went to a Miami club.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

In Amsterdam. Desiré van den Berg for The New York Times

Bike through Amsterdam, even if only in your mind. It’s tulip season!

Play a boring podcast before bed — it helps lessen anxiety to get you to sleep more quickly. (I go with ones about electric vehicles.)

Listen to Kacey Musgraves’s new single, “Dry Spell.” Jon Caramanica, our pop critic, says it’s a return to form for the cheeky Nashville star.

Take our news quiz.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were affiliating, flatlining and inflating.

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

P.S. Yesterday, I reported on a survey in which two-thirds of dog owners said that their animals were smarter than the average dog and said that this was “statistically impossible.” Many wrote to correct me. I meant a typical dog, a dog on the street, Yogi Bear’s average dog, the median dog. Except no one would ever say “the median dog.” Could I have written that differently? Probably. No one likes to have to explain something that’s meant to be whimsical. Point taken!

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

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April 18, 2026

Good morning. With spring comes the urge to spring-clean. It’s about so much more than just organizing your closet.

María-Jesús-Contreras

Trading spaces

	By Melissa Kirsch

The best time I ever moved was when I had a cast on my dominant arm. One would think such an impediment would have made the move — midwinter, in an ice storm, in a hurry — onerous, but I sidestepped the hassle by enlisting the movers to pack for me. What would have taken me weeks of “Does this spark joy” and Memory Lane reverie was accomplished in a few hours. Moving is always terrible, even if you aren’t down one paw, but having others dispassionately throw my stuff into boxes spared me both the physical and emotional labor of doing it myself.

It’s spring cleaning time, if you’re the sort to partake of such things. I used to think “spring cleaning” as a concept was some marketer’s gimmick to sell Windex, but the more springs I rack up, the more I understand the urge to dust and scour and air out once the sun’s out all the time, casting its withering gaze on my winter hoard. This year, I’m taking the very good (and new to me) advice of Christina Fallon, a professional organizer. “People get lost in the different chapters of their lives,” Fallon told The Times.

Her map to freeing her clients involves acknowledging the emotional freight that objects accumulate. She begins her decluttering in the bathroom, because people are less attached to old bottles of NyQuil than they are more cherished possessions. “Once they get used to saying ‘toss it,’ and they’ve started to build a purging muscle, we move on to harder things,” she said.

For those of us who don’t have the means or the desire to hire an organizer, I think just being aware that deaccession is hard, that our relationships with our things are sometimes more powerful than our desire for an uncluttered dresser, can be helpful. I’ve blamed my own laziness for my apparent inability to get rid of the bag of clothes that has been sitting in my living room for six months. But if I acknowledge I’m also holding onto it because I fear there’s something meaningful in there, I allow a little self-compassion into the equation. Then I can tough-love myself with Fallon’s maxim: “We only use about 20 percent of our wardrobe, so if you haven’t worn or used something within six months, you’re probably not going to use it.” The bag is going to Goodwill this weekend.

“Closets are the heart of the home,” Fallon said. “They show you people’s lives, what they collect and what they’ve shoved in the corners.” There is a closet in my apartment that qualifies as what my editor Tom calls a “chaos space.” I call it “The Id.” It’s so crammed with coats and shoes and tote bags that I have to use the full force of my body to close it. I hadn’t even thought that this was a location I could consider decluttering — it seems like it’s more powerful than I am, like I could move out and the bursting closet would still live there, its contents ready to jump out and scare the next tenant like one of those snake-in-a-can prank toys.

When I think about what would happen if I regained custody of The Id, I feel a dizzying sense of buoyancy, like the first day you go out without a winter parka. What if that mess were gone? What if it was a normal, respectable closet with a normal, respectable number of items in it? I’d be so much lighter! But the reality of totally clearing out the closet seems impossible, too large a task, plus where would all the tote bags go? I like the advice of another organizer: Set a timer for 15 minutes and see how much decluttering you can achieve. That’s manageable. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

That feeling of lightness we associate with spring is so tantalizing. If we can clear our physical space, we can clear our mental space, or so we fantasize. I always come back to a friend’s advice: “Everything you buy makes everything you own a little less valuable.” Just as there’s freedom in clearing space, there’s freedom, too, in being more deliberate about the things we allow into our lives. Thoreau advised having so few things to inventory that you could “keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” He insisted on the connection between our physical environments and our mental ones: “I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still.”

Making good

My new project, The Good List, has produced its own good thing: readers sending in their rituals for bringing more delight to their lives. Anne Patterson of Brooklyn writes:

A friend and I have decided to text a photo of a flower or group of flowers to each other each day. It can be the bunch of tulips I have on my dining room table. A beautiful painting of anemones by Matisse. A photo of the flowers for sale in the window of a local deli. The same tulips but now with the sunset behind them. It’s a great pick-me-up.

Sign up for The Good List here.

WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Strait of Hormuz

An oil tanker that passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Mohammed Aty/Reuters

Iran’s military said it had reimposed “strict control” over the Strait of Hormuz, adding to uncertainty over access to the waterway.

Peace Talks

Iran and the U.S. are finalizing a three-page memo laying out a framework for a permanent peace deal, Iranian officials said. It provides for 60 days of negotiations to reach an agreement. Many experts say that any deal should ensure that Pickaxe Mountain, a suspected Iranian nuclear site buried so deep that it may be impervious to aerial attack, is permanently shut down. Vice President JD Vance, who led the American delegation in Pakistan last week, has been tasked with defending Trump’s decisions. It’s a difficult position, as Zolan Kanno-Youngs explains in the video below. Click to play.

The New York Times

Lebanon Cease-fire

The truce between Israel and Hezbollah appeared to hold on its first day. U.N. peacekeepers said that Israel had stopped striking southern Lebanon and that Hezbollah had not fired on Israel. Thousands of people flocked to Lebanon’s devastated south to take stock of their homes. Many told The Times they felt a mix of joy and sadness as they returned home but found widespread destruction. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was assailed by allies and critics alike for agreeing to the cease-fire.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Trump’s Justice Department is pressing forward on an investigation into John Brennan, the former C.I.A. director. But a career prosecutor withdrew from the case over concerns about its legal viability. The Supreme Court will let oil companies move lawsuits accusing them of causing environmental damage out of Louisiana state courts, to friendlier federal venues. In the months leading up to the midterms, hundreds of A.I.-generated pro-Trump influencers have popped up on social media, posting at a rapid pace about the “radical left” and “America First.”

International

An 85-year-old widow, who was arrested and held for 16 days in a U.S. detention center, has been returned to France. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said he would invite investors to a meeting in September, seeking to attract about $730 billion in investment in Canada. The U.S. secretary of commerce blasted Canada for its trade negotiating strategy, adding, “They suck.” A 27-year-old diplomat is driving Trump’s efforts to upend decades of American support for Europe, a Times investigation finds.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

Music

Clement Pascal for The New York Times

The rapper Baby Keem has benefited from the support of his superstar cousin, Kendrick Lamar. But the path to his autobiographical album, “Casino,” was his alone. South Korea doesn’t have enough arenas to show off its K-pop stars. That’s why BTS began its world tour in a soccer stadium. A woman accused of stalking the former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and dousing him with an unknown substance was arrested.

Theater

“Titaníque,” a “Titanic” parody powered by Celine Dion hits, silly ad-libs and pop culture references, had the humblest of beginnings. Now the show has docked on Broadway. “Paddington,” a new musical about the marmalade-loving bear, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys. Ayo Edebiri stars as a haunted genius opposite Don Cheadle in “Proof” on Broadway. This revival, though, exposes the play’s lack of rigor, our theater critic writes.

More Culture

Inside the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre’s workshop. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

Forget Justin Bieber and Sabrina Carpenter. For some Coachella attendees, the festival’s most exciting performers are the puppets of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. See our Styles desk’s favorite looks from the first weekend of Coachella. (You can stream this weekend’s performances on the festival’s YouTube page.) Sid Krofft’s zany children’s television programs, including “H.R. Pufnstuf” and “Land of the Lost,” earned him a cult following. He died at 96. Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan play a married couple on the brink in “Beef,” Netflix’s stress-inducing series. The Times interviewed them about the show’s second season, out this week.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

By Melissa Clark

Rhubarb Raspberry Cobbler

A little cornmeal in the biscuits gives this homey rhubarb raspberry cobbler a pleasingly sandy texture, and frozen rhubarb works well if you’re still waiting on the fresh stuff. Tossed with raspberries and sweetened lightly with sugar, it bubbles into a tangy-sweet syrup that surrounds the fruit and soaks appealingly into the topping. Serve it warm for dessert with vanilla ice cream, or cold for breakfast dolloped with yogurt.

REAL ESTATE

Robin Clayton with her dog, Jackson, in Brooklyn. Katherine Marks for The New York Times

The Hunt: Tired of moving all the time, she set out to buy a condo near Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. Which did she choose? Play our game.

What you get for … $2 million in Vienna: A modern house set into a hillside. A rooftop apartment with a view of the opera house. A four-bedroom duplex with two terraces.

Pics or it didn’t happen: They’re fixing an abandoned home and filming the entire thing.

LIVING

Mary Sue Escamilla watches a travel video on her V.R. headset. Morgan Lieberman for The New York Times

V.R. bingo? Senior living communities are using virtual reality headsets as a tool to reduce social isolation and loneliness.

Tennis vs. pickleball: Which one is a better workout?

Novel approach: Self-help books are popular, but research suggests that fiction can increase empathy and well-being.

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

How to choose makeup for mature skin

Your makeup should work for you. After testing dozens of products for our new guide for mature skin, we have some advice. First, consider a hydrating primer. It can help smooth out the little crevices that foundation, concealer and blush tend to sink into (and call attention to). When you’re lining your lips and eyes, avoid rigid old-school pencils, which can tug and snag on textured skin. Opt instead for a gel-like pencil that’s got some glide. And for thinning or graying brows, a slim-tipped pencil can add definition with subtle, believable color. Last, have a little fun with your lipstick. There’s no better boost for your complexion (or mood) than a pop of color. — Abbie Kozolchyk

GAME OF THE WEEK

The Knicks’ Karl-Anthony Towns in a game earlier this month. Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Atlanta Hawks vs. New York Knicks, N.B.A. playoffs: This has been one of the league’s best postseason rivalries of late (though the main character from years past, Trae Young, is no longer with Atlanta). New York has the higher seed and the bigger names, with stars like Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns. But, as The Athletic’s John Hollinger points out, the Hawks’ starting lineup has been statistically better than the Knicks’ has, especially since Atlanta traded Young for CJ McCollum midseason. Still, Hollinger thinks the Knicks have an edge in the series, because of their deeper bench and stronger rebounding. His prediction: Knicks in six.

Game 1 is tonight at 6 p.m. Eastern on Prime Video

For more: After reaching the conference finals last year, the Knicks got a new coach and beefed up the roster. This year, it’s finals or bust.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was midbrain.

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

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April 19, 2026

Good morning. The situation in the Strait of Hormuz remains volatile. And the cease-fire in Lebanon appears to be holding. We have more news below.

But first, our chief fashion critic explains a surprising trend she noticed on the runways of Paris.

Tom Ford

Ageless beauty

	By Vanessa Friedman I’m The Times’s fashion director and chief fashion critic.

I first started noticing the gray hair and laugh lines when I was sitting beside the Tom Ford catwalk in Paris last month, watching his collection parade by. You don’t normally see such signs of age at Fashion Week — or, to be honest, pretty much anywhere else these days, at least not when we are talking about women held up as avatars of beauty — so these models really stood out.

And once I saw them there, I saw them everywhere: at Givenchy, Chanel, Bottega Veneta. They weren’t just the usual ex-supermodels, like Cindy Crawford, whose fame obviates their age. They were great-looking women who also didn’t look like they were trying to remain forever 25.

It was such a contrast to the heavily manufactured and airbrushed imagery that has become the norm in the celebritysphere that it started me wondering what exactly was going on — and whether this represented merely a momentary trend or a more meaningful shift. (You can read my full story here.) Today, I’m going to explain what I found.

Representation matters

“Age has become something brands seem genuinely proud to highlight,” Alexandra Van Houtte, the founder of the fashion search engine Tagwalk, told me after I got back and emailed her to check whether her data supported what I thought I had seen.

That sent me down a rabbit hole on social media, and I realized that not just brands but also more and more women were signposting the … well, signs of their age: posting pictures of their makeup-less faces, not fuzzed out with filters but bared for all to see. Paulina Porizkova, one of the models who defined the 1980s and ’90s, is happily (and mercilessly) chronicling her own aging — and has amassed a giant following because of it. So are some former editors and actors. Modeling agencies have taken note and are actively scouting older models.

(Fun fact: The fashion industry does not call older models “older models”; it calls them “generational models.” Another fun, or maybe not so fun, fact: In the fashion world, “old” generally means anyone over 30 — though the models and women currently getting most of the attention are in their 50s and above.)

Still, fashion has a mixed record when it comes to inclusivity, and while the industry seems to have finally, truly, embraced racial diversity when to comes to the runway and marketing, it has also almost fully abandoned recent efforts to engage with size diversity.

Which way is the age case going to go?

Fad or structural change?

The more people I spoke with, whether fashion insiders or observers, the more multilayered the answer seemed. It is deeply intertwined with not just the obvious driver of economics (older people have the power of the bank account), but also politics, culture, gender expectations, and the way social media and A.I. are shaping our ideas of how we should look.

Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times

“There’s always two poles in any movement,” Joan Juliet Buck, the author of the Substack Every Day Until I Die and the former editor of French Vogue, told me. “There’s this pull toward being post-human, shinier, newer, cloned, etc., the sense that people have elevated the lacquered surface of the machine over the body.” And, she said, there’s a corresponding pull toward “I’m real.”

Increasingly, a group of tastemakers are gravitating toward the real, in both the analog and digital worlds. That’s why the consensus among those I spoke with was that this shift is more significant, and perhaps more permanent, than the usual pendulum swing of age-is-in, age-is-out. This time, it might actually stick.

Ask Vanessa: Each week, Vanessa answers a reader’s fashion-related question. You can see recent editions here, and submit your own question via email or X. (Questions are edited and condensed.)

THE LATEST NEWS

The Middle East

Tankers anchored in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday. Asghar Besharati/Associated Press

Even if the Strait of Hormuz fully opens soon, it could take weeks for substantial amounts of oil and gas to reach buyers, analysts say. Two Indian-flagged ships reported being hit in the strait yesterday. The war in Iran has forced Qatar and other Persian Gulf states to rethink their security strategies.

The leader of Hezbollah said the group was willing to cooperate with the Lebanese authorities to end the war with Israel, but laid out difficult conditions for a lasting truce.

Politics

An appeals court ruled that construction on the White House ballroom project could continue through early June. Dozens of doctors are running as Democratic candidates in the midterms.

Around the World

Delcy Rodríguez The New York Times

Venezuela: Delcy Rodríguez, Nicolás Maduro’s successor, is carrying out a purge of the people who kept him in power. Bulgaria: Voters are going to the polls today, four months after mass protests brought down the government. Ukraine: A gunman killed six people in a mass shooting in Kyiv, the capital. The episode is being investigated as a terrorist act.

Other Big Stories

Pope Leo said that the media had misconstrued some of his recent comments and that he had no interest in continuing a debate with President Trump. A California man was charged with grand theft in a scheme to replace pieces of Lego with pasta.

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Representative Eric Swalwell resigned from Congress and dropped out of the California governor’s race after several women accused him of sexual assault. (He has denied the accusations.) What does his case tell us about Congress?

That #MeToo is alive and well. It’s a good sign that most people believed the women and that Swalwell was held accountable, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks write for The Hill: “If you believe that #MeToo was a blip on the radar, a passing moment, we would submit that perhaps you are wrong. Perhaps the movement hasn’t gone away at all, but has instead quietly become the norm.”

That our political culture still fails women. After the accusations emerged, many in politics said Swalwell’s conduct had been something of an open secret, writes Naomi Seligman for MS NOW: “What so many people knew did not keep Swalwell from climbing the party ranks. It did not deter his allies and donors from encouraging his run for California governor.”

FROM OPINION

The increase of tech usage in the classroom has left students unprepared for college, Molly Worthen writes.

Lucid dreaming — in which the dreamer is aware they’re dreaming — makes for a more fulfilling waking life, Cody Delistraty writes.

Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the lessons for liberals from Viktor Orban’s loss in Hungary and Maureen Dowd on Trump and the pope.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

Yago Castro

Believing: Laila Gohar, the artist and designer, thinks beauty can save us.

Gwendoline Riley: Her sharply observed domestic novels have caught on among stylish, literary-minded American women.

On Language: Have you noticed everything is “-coded” these days?

Tripped Up: An airline agent’s good deed cost a 90-year-old man $1,300, after an airport cart left him at the wrong gate. Who should cover the cost?

Chairman of the Nest: Paul Waldman was a bodybuilder who later turned to art, producing transgressive paintings and elaborate birdhouses. He died at 89.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: The New York Giants have agreed to trade the defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence to the Cincinnati Bengals for the No. 10 pick in the N.F.L. Draft after Lawrence publicly requested a trade.

College football: A Virginia Tech game was delayed after a skydiver crashed into the scoreboard, became stuck and had to be rescued.

Gymnastics: Oklahoma came from behind to overtake Louisiana State University and win the N.C.A.A women’s championship.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

	By Elisabeth Egan

“Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke: Burke’s best-selling debut novel takes us behind the scenes at Yesteryear Ranch, home of a popular and polarizing Instagram account run by Natalie Heller Mills, a self-declared tradwife. Married to a politician’s son, creator of content about tending chickens, baking bread and raising screen-free children, Natalie is an advocate for dialing back advances for women. That is, until her carefully curated world begins to crumble. Suddenly, she wakes up in 1855, the very era she’s idealized — only to discover that it’s a lot colder and grimmer than she imagined.

For more: Read our review of “Yesteryear,” and a profile of Burke, who spun TikTok popularity into a book deal.

THE INTERVIEW

Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

	By Lulu Garcia-Navarro

This week’s subject for The Interview is the actress Charlize Theron. We spoke about her new movie, “Apex,” but also about her experiences growing up with violence both inside and outside her South African home.

Your father was an alcoholic. As someone myself who has dealt with alcohol abuse in our family, it is an incredibly difficult thing, especially for a child. When did you realize that your own home life was different from your friends’?

Pretty young, I would say. I have memories from when I was really young, seeing really drunk people, and it scared me. Like, people crawling on the floor drunk. But that became so consistent that it was every Friday, Saturday, maybe even every Wednesday. My dad had built this big bar inside the house. That wasn’t unusual. A lot of South Africans create a space in their house where they can drink. But it became where he lived. He was a full-blown functioning drunk, but he had moments where he would go missing, we wouldn’t know where he was, and he would usually return in a state that was pretty severe. It would get messy and loud, and my mom’s not a wallflower either. She wasn’t just sitting and taking it. She made it known that she wasn’t happy about his lifestyle. So it really caused a lot of verbal abuse. Personally, for me, the worst thing was they would ice each other. There would be a big fight, and then they wouldn’t talk for three weeks. I didn’t have siblings, and that house just went silent.

Was he violent toward you?

He was scary. He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk. There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal. When I was around 12 or 13, I remember my mom using the word “divorce” for the first time. We didn’t know people who were divorced. My parents weren’t religious, but it was culturally one of those things you didn’t do. They had been married for 25 years. So when she said, “I think the best thing for us is for me to separate from him,” it was scary because I didn’t know what that would look like. I was almost talking her back into staying, because the alternative felt so foreign to me. But I think she knew and she was trying to figure out ways to get me out of the house. She sent me to a boarding school specifically because she wanted me to get out of the house. She was very aware of what it was doing to me.

It’s so strange — all the memories are there. And it’s not that I don’t try and think about it, but going in such a linear manner, it becomes almost more clear when you talk about it this way. Because people tend to just isolate it and want to talk about one thing. But it helps to explain that these things build, and they build, and it takes years for things to go as wrong as it did in my house.

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 …

Build your lats with this gigantic pull-up bar. It’s a beast to store, but it’s the best of its kind.

See who’s outside your door — even when you aren’t home — with these smart doorbell cameras.

Flaunt your awesome, maybe-a-little-bit-performative vinyl records using these display techniques. (Grab a turntable, too, while you’re at it.)

MEAL PLAN

Dane Tashima for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Emily Weinstein, the editor in chief of New York Times Cooking, loves escovitch. It’s a Jamaican delicacy of pan-fried flaky white fish, seasoned with allspice and adorned with bell peppers, carrots, onions and Scotch bonnet chiles — all soaked in warm vinegar. This week, she’s making a version with snapper, along with Bò Lúc Lắc and three other great dishes.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was comeback.

Can you put eight historical events — including the Treaty of Paris, the first chimpanzee in space and the writing of “The Hobbit” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

[phkrause]

April 20, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Iran said it would retaliate after the U.S. seized an Iranian cargo ship near the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump said American negotiators would arrive in Pakistan today for a second round of peace talks.

We’ll get to that, and more, below — including a look at the movie “Reefer Madness” because it’s 4/20. But first, let’s go behind the scenes at the Supreme Court.

Eric Lee for The New York Times

In chambers

Here’s how the Supreme Court generally makes decisions: For more than 200 years, it has worked at a slow and deliberate pace, weighing written briefs and oral arguments. The justices listen, read, discuss, vote and write detailed opinions and dissents that explain their thinking. They pass judgment only after lower courts have ruled.

In February 2016, though, the justices issued a short, cryptic ruling on an environmental policy from the Obama administration, days after receiving abbreviated briefs and without hearing oral arguments. In a terse paragraph heavy on legal boilerplate, and lacking any reasoning, the court simply blocked the president’s energy plan.

Why did that happen? Ordinarily, we’d have had to wait generations to hear the answer — until well after the deaths of the justices involved, when their private papers came into the public domain. But Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, whose work has been giving us a new view of the Supreme Court, obtained memos the justices wrote to one another in the days before the release of their 2016 decision that help illuminate the reason.

The memos don’t show much evidence of the careful debate that usually attends the justices’ work. Instead, as Jodi and Adam report, they show Chief Justice John Roberts forcefully arguing that the subject was too important to wait for their normal procedures.

Since 2016, the Supreme Court has relied more and more on that fast track, which legal experts call the “shadow docket,” to make decisions. The rulings are nominally temporary; the justices often come back with a full decision a year or two later. But the effects can be profound. The current justices have granted President Trump more than 20 victories this way, burnishing his power over immigration, federal funding and executive agencies.

The Times is publishing the memos to show how the court shifted to doing business this way.

A flurry of memos

Inside the Supreme Court chamber. Amir Hamja/The New York Times

The 2016 case put two visions of government in conflict. Here’s Jodi and Adam:

The president was under enormous pressure to address the global climate crisis. He had campaigned on that promise, then for eight years as the planet heated, he failed to get major environmental legislation through Congress. With his term about to end, this was his last chance to act.

The chief justice was eager to assert his institution’s authority and to rein in Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency.

The memos show that Roberts used the shadow docket to do both. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan had proposed to shift the nation’s energy consumption from coal to renewables. When more than two dozen states, along with business groups, sued to stop it, an appeals court allowed the plan to continue until it issued a decision. The challengers then went directly to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to hit pause while the litigation continued. It was what the court calls an “emergency request.”

Roberts got that request in late January, just as the justices were leaving Washington for their annual midwinter break: Clarence Thomas was in Florida; Stephen Breyer went to Paris to lecture; Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a talk in Italy; Antonin Scalia traveled to Asia.

Across a five-day blizzard of memos, the justices hashed it out:

Writing on formal letterhead, but addressing one another by their first names and signing off with their initials, they sound notes of irritation, air grievances and plead for more time. In addition to the usual legal materials, they cite a blog post and, twice, a television interview. They sometimes engage with one another’s arguments. But they often simply talk past each other.

Roberts insisted that they halt the president’s Clean Power Plan before the court could weigh the arguments, because it “will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector.” At the end, the liberal and conservative justices were tied, so the decision came down to Anthony Kennedy. He made it in a three-sentence note. He believed that the court would ultimately stop the Clean Power Plan anyway, and saw no reason to put off the decision.

The new normal

Since the 2016 decision about the Clean Power Plan, applications to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket have mushroomed. Partly that’s because of a gridlocked Congress. Partly it’s because presidents, especially Trump, push the boundaries of executive power. But as Jodi and Adam write, it is also because judges departed from a legal tradition that developed over centuries — now, to Trump’s benefit.

Many of the emergency challenges the justices receive from the left today concern “substantial and irreversible changes,” just like the Clean Power Plan was said to do. But this time, the justices let them stand. “We’ve done it to ourselves,” Sotomayor said at a speech in Alabama this month.

This investigation is what we call in the newsroom a real scoop. It’s incredibly rare to see how the justices talk to each other outside of public view. Read their exchanges here. And you can listen to Jodi and Adam discuss the investigation on today’s episode of The Daily.

THE LATEST NEWS

Middle East

The Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska as seen from a U.S. destroyer, the Spruance. US Central Command, via Reuters

Oil prices rose this morning after Iran said it would retaliate for the ship seizure. The Israeli military said it had struck a loaded rocket launcher in southern Lebanon during its cease-fire there. It called the device an imminent threat. Senior Hamas officials in Gaza said the group was ready to hand over some weapons. That would be a concession, but still well short of Israeli and U.S. demands.

Politics

The Trump administration is taking steps to begin refunding billions collected under the tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February. Syrian billionaires are invoking the Trump name to get favors in Washington.

Around the World

Britain: The counterterrorism police are investigating a series of arson attacks against Jewish sites in London. They are focusing on an Islamic group that might have ties to Iran. Bulgaria: Voters rejected the center-right party that has dominated the country’s politics for a decade. Hungary: Why did voters chose Peter Magyar over Viktor Orban in a landslide? In the video below, our reporter Andrew Higgins offers some insights. Click to play.

The New York Times

Other Big Stories

A humanoid robot won a half-marathon in Beijing, with a reported time nearly seven minutes faster than the human world record. The U.S. military struck another boat in the Caribbean, killing three people. A Louisiana man killed eight children, including seven of his own, in a shooting spree.

OPINIONS

Title X was created to help give women access to affordable contraceptives and health care. Trump is upending this, Jill Filipovic writes.

Here is a column by David French on Trump’s feud with the pope.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

In Nepal in March. Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times

Gen Z resistance: A youthful revolution brought down Nepal’s government and gave hope to young people worldwide. Will it lead to real change?

Americans abroad: Some went to save money. Now, they can’t afford to come back.

Metropolitan Diary: Divided by a common language.

A songwriter: Don Schlitz won a Grammy for the Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler,” and also wrote for Randy Travis, the Judds and Mary Chapin Carpenter. He died at 73.

TODAY’S NUMBER

31,556,952

— That is how many seconds there are in a year, according to the calculations of Sean McGowan, a writer on our Games team, who extrapolated it from a crossword clue last week: “1/86,400 of a day: Abbr.” I’ll let him explain.

SPORTS

N.B.A.: The defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder opened the first round of the Western Conference playoffs with a 119-84 blowout win over the Phoenix Suns. In the Eastern Conference, Jayson Tatum led the Boston Celtics to a 123-91 win over the Philadelphia 76ers.

M.L.B.: The New York Mets lost their 11th straight game. This skid is the Mets’ worst since 2004.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Julia Gartland for The New York Times

Jimmy Bradley was the chef and owner of a terrific Manhattan restaurant called the Red Cat. It had a nearly 20-year run in Chelsea before closing in 2018. Some days I get sentimental about it and make this salad I used to eat at the bar: a Gruyère fondue, basically, topped with bacon, potato wedges and a bitter salad of greens — cold against warm, and salty against faintly sweet and acidic. Give it a shot this week. You won’t be sorry.

THE POETRY CHALLENGE

The New York Times

Let’s memorize a poem together this week. For one thing, it’s fun. For another, it’s a challenge that yields an intense reward: You’ve memorized a poem. That’s not nothing.

We did this last year and more readers than we can count took part. Now we’re on to a new challenge: W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One.” A.O. Scott, the critic who’ll hold our hands through the next five days, calls it “a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.”

Watch the actor Matthew McConaughey read the poem and then join us in learning it by heart. We built a game to get you started. Give that a shot, and then come back tomorrow for more!

More on culture

Jenni Parido is the new leader of America’s delegation to the 2026 Venice Biennale, the festival that opens next month as the art world’s version of the Olympics. She’s not an art world veteran. Her most recent job was running a luxury pet food store in Tampa, Fla. Zachary Small, who covers the art world, explored Parido’s unlikely rise. It is quite a tale. For the latest installment of our Good-Bad Movie series, Maya Salam looks at one of the first American films that’s so ridiculously bad it manages to turn a corner to become (unintentionally) good: the 1936 anti-marijuana morality tale “Reefer Madness,” which became a cult classic in the 1970s. 😵‍💫🍃

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Paramount Pictures

Watch Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 thriller, “The Conversation,” which is streaming for free on YouTube. Gene Hackman plays an expert audio eavesdropper whose life slowly spirals out of control after he learns of a murder plot in a conversation he’s been hired to record.

Start your conversations with something more probing than “Wassup?” Jancee Dunn, who writes the Well newsletter, has some alternatives.

Take our news quiz.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were illuminati and matutinal.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. If you want to see more of my colleagues’ great reporting in your Google search results, take a minute to add The Times as a preferred source. It’s easy: Just click this link. 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

[phkrause]

April 21, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Officials said Vice President JD Vance would lead an American delegation back to Pakistan today for peace talks with Iran. But it’s not clear if the Iranians will show up.

There’s more on the war, the administration and other big stories below. (Plus, it’s Iggy Pop’s birthday.) But let’s start with the price of gas.

In Massachusetts. Simon Simard for The New York Times

Pain at the pump

A lot of you are feeling this war at the gas pump. I sure am. It now costs me $106 to fill my full-size pickup truck at the neighborhood station. I know the owner a little, and I raised my eyebrows at him when I was done. He shrugged. It was clear drivers had been grinding him about it all day.

You read abstractions about the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, the unstable oil market. Then you go pump 10 gallons into your minivan and experience what that means at home. Ouch.

But don’t take it out on the station owner, Lydia DePillis told me. Lydia, who covers the American economy, reported on why price hikes at the filling station take so long to go away. When oil prices spike, profit margins shrink for businesses down the supply chain, she said. To recoup, they keep prices a little higher even as their costs shrink.

For her story, Lydia went deep on the math those gas station owners have to do as prices spike. She introduced readers to a Massachusetts gas station owner named Alex Weatherall:

He refills his tanks about every four days, and the “rack price” that his wholesale gasoline provider charges jumped to $3.347 per gallon last week from $2.398 on Feb. 25 — an increase of 39.6 percent. His last truckload cost $39,488.

Weatherall raised his price by only 33.8 percent: “He would charge more, but he feared losing business if his competitors did not follow,” Lydia wrote. “Fewer visits also mean lower sales at his convenience store and restaurant.”

Gas stations — and especially independently run ones like Weatherall’s — rely for much of their income on the snacks and sodas and cigarettes and beer they sell inside. “If I had to solely rely on fuel as my only source of profit, I wouldn’t stay in business,” another owner told Lydia. “I want the consumer to come in the store, and we do everything we can to entice them to come in.”

Sources: AAA (national average); U.S. Energy Information Administration (wholesale prices). Lydia DePillis/The New York Times

Feeling squeezed

Because those people who come into the store? They’re often regulars. They have relationships with the staff. They experience the gas station as a community hub. That can add to the pressure when it comes to setting prices — wherever you live. (Look at this map showing how much people pay in each state.)

My colleague Michael Barbaro, a host of “The Daily,” went to suburban Jacksonville, Fla., to hear about that pressure. He and his team spent time with a gas station manager named Cameron Joudi, who has had to ratchet up the price of his gas again and again. “He wasn’t repeatedly raising gas prices on strangers,” Michael said. “He was raising prices on people he really cares about. People who he knows are already stretched very thin.”

It’s hard, Joudi told Michael: “I hope they understand that I’m not pricing my gas to make a quick buck,” he said. “I’m pricing my gas how I need to price it in order to stay afloat.” Joudi said he makes around 10 cents to 15 cents per gallon he sells. His tank, Michael reported, holds around 8,000 gallons, which lasts a couple of weeks. That means a profit of between $800 and $1,200 — not a fortune.

But a rise can still hurt Joudi’s customers. “The Daily” spoke to one of them, a veteran who served in Afghanistan. Where did he get the money to cover the higher cost of his gas? From the grocery budget, he said:

We’ve been going to those food banks every now and then, which help out. I like those. A lot of local churches do help out, so that’s pretty nice. I have three kids. So I make sure that they eat first. So usually we’ll get all their food first.

Usually. Sometimes he and his wife don’t eat. Which is a good reminder: Pain at the pump is relative.

Related: Environmental groups are suing the Trump administration to stop BP from starting a new $5 billion drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico.

THE LATEST NEWS

War in the Middle East

The U.S. Navy has turned back 27 ships trying to enter or leave Iranian ports since its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz began last week, military officials said. An Israeli soldier was photographed swinging a sledgehammer at a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military says it is investigating.

The image is undated but began spreading on social media Sunday. It came from Debl, a village a few miles north of the Israeli border. via Reuters

Politics

Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, is suing The Atlantic over an article that claimed his job was in jeopardy because of excessive drinking and impulsiveness. Trump’s labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is stepping down. She had been facing an internal inquiry into charges of misconduct.

Around the World

In Ukraine in February. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Ukraine: The military is using ground-based robots to carry out assaults using guns, bombs and rockets while keeping its soldiers out of harm’s way. Mexico: A gunman killed a tourist and wounded several other people — including some Americans — at the Teotihuacán archaeological site outside Mexico City. Argentina: The country’s right-wing president, Javier Milei, tamed runaway inflation. Now he wants to transform Argentines’ values.

Business

Source: FactSet. The New York Times

Tim Cook is stepping down as C.E.O. of Apple. John Ternus, the company’s head of hardware engineering, will replace him. (Who is Ternus? We explain.) California accused Amazon of price fixing, saying the company had pressured brands like Levi’s and Hanes to ask competing retailers to raise prices.

Other Big Stories

The satirical newspaper The Onion announced a new plan to take over the operation of Infowars, the conspiracy-peddling website formerly owned by Alex Jones. A judge must approve the deal. The singer known as D4vd was charged with the murder of a teenage girl whose decomposed body was found in the trunk of his car. Health influencers, many of them aligned with the MAHA movement, are promoting nicotine as a health hack. In the video below, Dani Blum explains what’s going on. Click to play.

The New York Times

THE MORNING QUIZ

This question comes from a recent edition of the newsletter. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)

A California man was charged with grand theft in a $34,000 scheme in which the police said he …

Stole thousands of gallons from a “strategic maple syrup reserve.”

Returned Lego sets in which he had swapped out the bricks for dried pasta. Sold Medicaid patients prostheses made of cardboard. Broke into the set of “Abbott Elementary” and then auctioned props on eBay.

OPINIONS

Rebecca Archer’s daughter Renae was too young to get the measles vaccine before an outbreak in her town. She caught the disease — and died from its complications a decade later.

Here is a column by Thomas B. Edsall on Trump’s legacy as a kind of last will and testament.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

Nick Browning with the typewriter inmates use in the Jessup Correctional Institution’s library. Alex Kent for The New York Times

Jailbroken: Prisons ban A.I. chatbots. But inmates are finding ways to use them anyway.

Blow fish: Swedish researchers gave salmon cocaine.

Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was this year’s poetry challenge.

TODAY’S NUMBER

225

— That is the number of electrical substations that power trains in the New York City subway. Dozens are nearing 100 years old and need renovation or replacement. See what they look like and learn what they do.

SPORTS

Boston Marathon: Both of last year’s champions defended their titles. John Korir was nearly three minutes faster than his 2025 win, setting a course record of 2:01:52. Sharon Lokedi won the women’s race in 2:18:51.

N.B.A.: What makes an N.B.A. champion? Here’s what seven metrics have told us over 20 years.

College sports: A Cal State Northridge volleyball player, Jordan Lucas, has gone viral for his eccentric celebrations. He’s embracing his role as an entertainer.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

Anzac Day is coming up on Saturday. It commemorates members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought in the Gallipoli campaign in World War I. They had hard, flavorless rations, but in the years since, Anzac biscuits have provided sweeter memories — toasted rolled oats and shredded coconut combined with brown sugar and golden syrup. Cue an Australian accent: Fair dinkum.

FLY GUYS

The University of Chicago Press

The spare and literary fly-fishing novella “A River Runs Through It,” by Norman Maclean, turns 50 this month. It has sold more than a million copies. The spare and literary fly-fishing writer Monte Burke took a close look at the book’s history and wondered: Would it have been a hit if it came out today?

More on culture

The resale market for La Marzocco espresso machines is on fire, reports Priya Krishna, who covers food culture. The machines make good coffee, yes, but they also look cool and aren’t difficult to service. “They occupy this space that is like a Ferrari and a John Deere tractor at the same time,” one coffee executive told her. A leather-bound collection of eight letters written by the Romantic poet John Keats to Fanny Brawne, his muse, went missing in the 1980s, stolen from a fat cat’s family estate on Long Island. Then last year someone tried to sell it to a Manhattan rare-book dealer. That sparked an investigation. Yesterday, after a ceremony at the district attorney’s office, the book went home to one of the family’s heirs. Its value? $2 million. Late night hosts speculated about Kash Patel’s future.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Iggy Pop at Coachella. Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Coachella

Listen to Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” He turns 79 today.

Apologize with style, or compliment with elegance, using one of the online flower delivery services recommended by the etiquette crusaders at Wirecutter.

Ease the foot pain that can come when we swap winter boots for flip-flops and sandals. These three simple exercises may help.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was daintily.

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

[phkrause]

April 22, 2026

	by Sam Sifton and Evan Gorelick

Good morning. It’s Earth Day.

The United States and Iran are locked in an uneasy stalemate. President Trump extended a cease-fire that was set to expire last night. But it’s not clear if peace talks will go forward. Read the latest updates here.

And Virginia voters approved a new congressional map. We’ll get to that, and more, below — including a performance by a parrot with a prosthetic beak. But first, my colleague Evan and I take a look at what’s happening in Congress.

Kylie Cooper/Reuters

Congressional chaos

The 119th Congress is a mess. Partisan gridlock strangles both houses even though Republicans hold thin majorities. Misconduct scandal after misconduct scandal keeps a bad light shining on the Hill.

Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Florida Democrat, resigned from the House yesterday to avoid an expulsion vote. She had violated more than two dozen House rules, including campaign finance laws, according to the chamber’s ethics committee. (She still faces federal criminal charges alleging that she stole $5 million in coronavirus disaster relief funds.)

Also out: Representative Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, and Representative Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican. They both resigned last week after women who had been on their staffs accused them of sexual misconduct.

And the House could expel Representative Cory Mills, a Florida Republican under investigation by the ethics committee to see if he, too, violated campaign finance laws. Mills has also been accused of assault and threatening a former girlfriend with the release of revenge porn.

A resignation would go down easier than an expulsion, said Carl Hulse, who covers Congress. “Members are going to be reluctant to oust anyone if it cuts into their numbers with the margin so thin, even if they believe the person deserves it,” he wrote in an email. His subject line: “crazy congress.”

Why is Congress such a train wreck? Let’s see.

A hot mess

Since President Trump’s return, Republicans have enjoyed what every ruling partisan wants: control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. A trifecta.

That kind of power supposedly greases the legislative machinery. But the Republican-led Congress last year hit historic lows for productivity, even by the institution’s own dysfunctional standards. House members cast 362 votes last year, the second-lowest count in a quarter-century. And just 64 bills became law. It struggles with the basics: The Department of Homeland Security, which employs some 260,000 people, has been shut down for nearly 70 days because lawmakers can’t agree on a deal to reopen it. As lawmaking cratered, our elected officials passed a record number of partisan rebukes to scold and punish one another.

Americans notice: Congress’s approval rating has plunged to 10 percent, according to Gallup polling released this morning. Even the I.R.S. scores better.

Meanwhile, Congress has ceded some of its powers to the White House: Republican members did little as the president refused to spend funds they had allocated and federal programs they had created. The Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to declare war, but the G.O.P. has blocked Democratic-led efforts to curb Trump’s authority to fight in Iran.

Trouble for Republicans

Many Americans say it’s time for a change. A year ago, it seemed like a pipe dream to hope that Democrats might retake control of Congress. Now they have a shot at capturing both the House and the Senate.

So far, everything is going their way. Trump’s approval rating is down. Gas prices are up. Americans are angry about war in the Middle East. Recent elections have shown shifts of up to 20 points in Democrats’ favor compared with the 2024 election that returned Trump to the White House. A blue wave isn’t assured, but here’s the math:

The House. Republicans have a five-seat majority (which includes one independent), so Democrats need to flip just a few seats (and keep their current ones) to win a majority next year. Kamala Harris carried nine Republican-held districts in 2024, and House Republicans hold 21 additional seats that Trump won by 10 points or less. Democrats are targeting Republican seats once considered out of reach. And in Virginia yesterday, voters approved a new congressional map that tips up to four more House seats toward Democrats:

Elena Shao/The New York Times

The Senate. Flipping the Senate would require Democrats to win at least four Republican-held seats (while losing none of their own). Recent polls show Democrats tied or ahead in four states. In Maine and North Carolina, the likely Democratic nominees hold clear leads; the party has also recruited strong candidates in Ohio and Alaska.

Nate Cohn/The New York Times

Dysfunction junction

Possible expulsions, forced resignations, retirements, gridlock, shutdowns, bad polling? We went back to Carl to ask about the mood on the Hill right now:

Certainly the Republican mood is not good. To me, it’s reminiscent of 2006, when the Republican majority entered the midterms under the weight of an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and a cloud of corruption over Congress. Democrats won back both chambers.

The whole place is pretty much on pins and needles.

WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Iran

Trump said he was extending the cease-fire until Iran’s “leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.” Trump’s preferred strategy of coercive diplomacy isn’t working with Iran. In the video below, our reporter David Sanger explains what the history of U.S.-Iran negotiations could mean for the latest talks. Click to play.

The New York Times

Lebanon

Lebanese villages held mass funerals for the civilians and Hezbollah fighters killed in the war. Israel pulled two soldiers from combat duty and sentenced them to 30 days in jail after one photographed the other swinging a sledgehammer at the head of a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Afghans in Qatar in August 2021, applying for immigration to the U.S.  Sgt. Jimmie Baker/U.S. Army, via Getty Images

Trump is working on a plan that would send some Afghans who aided U.S. forces to Congo, an aid worker said. These Afghans have been living in limbo in Qatar for more than a year. A year after U.S.A.I.D.’s death, fired workers have plowed through savings, cashed out retirement funds and moved in with relatives. Fewer than half have found new full-time jobs, former colleagues estimate. The U.S. sent a plane to Cuba to retrieve a 10-year-old American child the F.B.I. believed had been kidnapped by a transgender parent and her partner, potentially to undergo gender transition surgery. Tucker Carlson says he is “tormented” by his role in Trump’s return to the White House.

Around the World

Ukraine: Officials have suggested renaming part of the Donbas region “Donnyland” to get Trump’s attention. Africa: The pope’s tour is skipping some of the continent’s biggest Catholic nations.

Artificial Intelligence

JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up billions in profits while shedding 15,000 employees between them. All credit A.I. with helping automate work. Florida prosecutors say ChatGPT advised a man as he planned a school shooting. He’s accused of killing two people at Florida State last year. An elite Wall Street law firm has apologized to a federal judge for submitting a court filing full of A.I. “hallucinations.”

Other Big Stories

Clockwise from top left: Chachi tree frog, dung beetle, brown-headed spider monkey, flame-rumped tanager. Timo Metz, Javier Aznar, Scott Tragese

Rainforests can recover from deforestation more quickly than scientists thought, a new study finds, with plants and animals returning to affected land after just a few decades. People have reported seeing far more meteors than usual this spring. Scientists attribute that to the natural ebb and flow of the cosmos, not alien activity.

OPINIONS

“Separation” tells the true story of a Honduran family living under the threat of deportation, in the form of a graphic novel reported by Jake Halpern and illustrated by Michael Sloan. Read it here.

Jason Furman, Neera Tanden and Elizabeth Wilkins chat with David Leonhardt about why Americans are leaving blue states.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

The poet Ilhan Sami Çomak, right, and his partner, Ipek Ozel, at home in Istanbul. Bradley Secker for The New York Times

A Turkish love story: After a forced confession and a death sentence, a Kurdish poet spent 30 years in jail. There, he found his voice and his life partner.

Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was a video about influencers promoting health benefits of nicotine.

TODAY’S NUMBER

13

— That is the age in years of Bruce, a disabled kea parrot in New Zealand who uses a prosthetic beak he made himself and became the “alpha male” of his group by learning to joust. Really.

SPORTS

“Curse of the Mambino”? On April 9, Zohran Mamdani posed for a joyous picture with the New York Mets mascots. The Mets haven’t won since.

N.B.A.: Victor Wembanyama suffered a concussion during Game 2 of the San Antonio Spurs’ playoff series against the Portland Trail Blazers. The series is now tied 1-1, and Wembanyama’s availability for Game 3 is up in the air.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Christopher Testani for The New York Times

I like Ali Slagle’s recipe for egg and cheese quesadillas, although I know if you make it yourself the quesadillas will mold to your tastes and abilities. You may come to flip the tortilla differently, use a different cheese or add some interior salsa or bacon. That’s great. (Try it with duck eggs if you run into some.) Me, I top everything with crema and hot sauce, and I always make two at a time, in separate pans. Serve with sliced avocado and call that breakfast — or dinner.

HONKY TONKIN’

The Longhorn after a $20 million restoration. Jake Dockins for The New York Times

The Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas opened in 1950, the biggest dance hall in Texas. It hosted Nat King Cole, Johnny Cash and the Sex Pistols before falling into disrepair and closing early in the pandemic. Now it’s back, burnished and larger than ever.

More on culture

How cultured are you? Find out with T Magazine’s quiz. (It’s hard!) Corporate “day in my life” videos, which illuminate the rituals and etiquette of modern office culture, are proliferating online. They offer a mix of clackety-keyboard A.S.M.R., loneliness, snacky lunches and middle-class comfort. Do we aspire to this?

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Fishing on the Botteniga River in Treviso, Italy. Matteo de Mayda for The New York Times

Fish the canals of Treviso, north of Venice, and experience the joys of urban angling. (I sure have, here in New York.)

Watch Zach Galifianakis’s “This Is a Gardening Show,” which premieres on Netflix tonight. It’s really earnest, not a bit.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was brickwork.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam

Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

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April 23, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. The White House says that Iran’s seizure of two ships in the Strait of Hormuz is not a deal-breaker for peace negotiations. And senators didn’t get much sleep. They were up well past midnight voting on budget proposals. Fun.

There’s more news below, as well as an interview with Anne Hathaway. But I’m going to start today with numbers.

In Tehran this month. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Iran war index

I grew up reading the Harper’s Index, a collection of statistics that has run in Harper’s Magazine since 1984. There’s something both spare and illuminating about each one. The collected facts amount to a kind of poetry, as these three stanzas from the May 2026 issue suggest:

Percentage of Americans who say that, as children, they knew a compassionate, nonjudgmental adult: 35

Percentage of these Americans who say that their mother was such a person: 50

That their father was: 5

As the cease-fires in Iran and Lebanon tremble, my colleague Evan Gorelick and I thought an index would be a useful way to examine the war. Numbers can help us understand what’s happening in the region and in the world beyond it, as the U.S. and Iran jockey for control of the Strait of Hormuz and Pakistani officials try to nudge diplomats from Washington and Tehran toward the negotiating table in Islamabad.

Oil and transit

The share of the world’s oil that passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the war: one-fifth. The number of ships that sailed through the strait on any given day before the war: 130. The number of ships that did so Tuesday: 1. (Here’s what to know about Iran’s stranglehold on the strait.)

Adina Renner/The New York Times

The increase in the price of diesel fuel since the war began: 45 percent. That’s more than gasoline went up. Here’s why. The number of flights Lufthansa Group, the German airline, said it would cut over the next six months to save jet fuel: 20,000. (Read more about the war’s disruptions of the airline industry.)

Politics and diplomacy

Days since the U.S. and Israel began joint strikes against Iran: 54. The number of targets the U.S. military says it has struck: more than 13,000. The number of days until President Trump’s authority to wage war without congressional action ends: 8. (Here’s one of our congressional reporters explaining how the law affects Trump’s calculations — or encourages him to go around it.)

The toll

The number of senior Iranian officials Israel says it has killed: more than 250. The number of U.S. military service members killed in the war, according to Central Command: 13. The number of people killed in Iran during the war, according to Iranian state media and a U.S.-based rights group: more than 3,000, including 1,700 civilians.

At a mass funeral in Lebanon. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

The number of people killed during Israeli strikes on Lebanon, according to Lebanese officials: nearly 2,300. The number of people killed in Israel by missiles fired from Iran and Lebanon, according to Israel’s ambulance service: 23.

Follow a timeline of the hostilities, including key moments and attacks.

And finally:

The number of items — including articles, videos, blog posts, opinion essays and interactive features, maps and trackers — that The Times has published about the Iran conflict and its ramifications, as of yesterday afternoon: 2,023.

More on the war

Israeli strikes killed a journalist and injured another in southern Lebanon. The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave more power to the Revolutionary Guards. The U.S. is withholding money that Iraq earned from its own oil sales to pressure Baghdad to distance itself from Iran.

IN ONE IMAGE

David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Before the cease-fire paused the fighting in Lebanon this week, Israel had struck every major bridge along the Litani River, which divides the country’s north and south, in its battle against Hezbollah.

The Times photographer David Guttenfelder recently captured the image above at one of those bridges. Mariam Ayad and her husband, Ali Ali, were helping their nephew climb over the rubble as they journeyed south to reunite with family. They planned to have a picnic of boiled potatoes and vegetables — crops Mariam had planted before the war.

Take a closer look at the photo.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

The F.B.I. began an investigation last month into a Times reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, after she wrote about how Kash Patel used bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend with security and transportation. (Read the original story.) The Navy secretary was fired yesterday after months of infighting with senior Pentagon leaders. The Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacy, with financial crimes. Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat who served nearly three decades in the state’s legislature before being elected to Congress, died at 80. His vacancy alters the balance of the House to favor Republicans. Lawmakers have questioned the ability of Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick for Fed chair, to lead the central bank independently. In the video below, Colby Smith explains how Warsh has tried to distance himself from the president. Click to watch.

The New York Times

Around the World

In London. Tolga Akmen/EPA, via Shutterstock

Britain: Parliament approved a bill to permanently ban tobacco sales to anyone born in 2009 or later, with the aim of creating a “smoke-free generation.” Ukraine: A new law in the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol requires Ukrainians to get Russian title deeds or risk losing their homes. Israel: At an independence day ceremony, the government honored a rabbi who has called to “flatten” the Gaza Strip.

Health

“Free birth,” a social media trend that says women should give birth without doctors, midwives or prenatal care, is putting mothers and babies at risk. The acting head of the C.D.C. canceled the publication of a study showing the benefits of Covid vaccines.

Business

The Trump administration is considering lending Spirit Airlines as much as $500 million to keep the company from shutting down. Anthropic’s new A.I. model, Mythos, has prompted concern worldwide. So far, the company has shared the technology only in the U.S. and Britain. A Russian pro-Kremlin outlet called the model “worse than a nuclear bomb.”

OPINIONS

In a Latino congressional district that once backed Trump, Bobby Pulido is winning voters by performing his hit songs at quinceañeras, Michelle Cottle writes.

Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens discuss the Trump administration’s rotating cast of characters.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

A star party at McDonald Observatory in Texas. Emily Elconin for The New York Times

Out of this world: The largest dark-sky reserve on Earth surrounds an observatory in the Big Bend region of Texas. That allows it to provide a portal to the early universe.

Self-defense: A Capitol Police officer was wrongfully implicated in a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory. Her accusers won’t let her move on.

Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was a video about negotiations with Iran.

TODAY’S NUMBER

$444,000

— That is how much money one plastic surgery practice earned last year for a breast-reduction surgery. Under the No Surprises Act, doctors can argue their case to an arbitration panel and, if they win, bill a patient’s insurance company. They win a lot. How does it work?

SPORTS

N.F.L.: Ready for the draft? The Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza is expected to go No. 1 to the Las Vegas Raiders tonight. Here’s the final mock draft for all 32 first-round picks.

N.B.A.: Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan have reconnected after not speaking for 14 years.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

It’s a little misleading to call these bulgogi sandwiches I learned to make at the elbow of the chef Hooni Kim “sliders.” They’re not something a cater-waiter would serve you off a tray. They’re full-size burger buns slicked with spicy mayonnaise, stuffed with fragrant, thin-sliced brisket and topped with a quick-pickled scallion salsa that I sometimes replace with straight napa kimchi. Flavor on top of flavor on top of flavor.

A TENACIOUS QUEEN

Thea Traff for The New York Times

Anne Hathaway joined the “Popcast” team to talk about the three movies she has coming out this year, including “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” which opens this week. (See photos from the premiere. The fashion people really showed up for this one.) “Something happened when I turned 40 and I just realized I was living my life like it was a dress rehearsal,” she told the hosts, “and that actually, it was showtime.” Watch here.

More on culture

Making sake. The New York Times

See sake made the hard way — with no machines, no chemicals and no commercial yeasts — at a 350-year-old brewery in Japan. Oh, and there’s singing, too. Holland Cotter, our art critic, takes the measure of the new galleries at LACMA in Los Angeles. He calls them a beacon of glam with brains but says they have problems, too.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Listen to Lindsay Zoladz’s latest playlist from “The Amplifier,” featuring new songs she’s stoked about from Slayyyter, Nine Inch Nails and more.

Try one of these fancy chocolate bars. We had 43 culinary heavy hitters vote on them.

Study Jerry Saltz’s remarkable photographs and memories of the ’90s art world in New York, in New York magazine.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were invincible and vincible.

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

[phkrause]

April 24, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. It’s so rare that I can come to you with good news. But here’s some now.

The rate of suicides among young people in the United States has dropped 11 percent below projections since the rollout of 988, the national suicide prevention hotline. It dropped even more significantly in states with the highest numbers of calls, according to a new study that Ellen Barry, who covers mental health, wrote about this week. Nearly 4,400 adolescents and young adults are alive, we think, because of the program.

The Department of Health and Human Services introduced 988 in July 2020 with bipartisan support and a $1.5 billion investment for the crisis centers that field calls. (It replaced a 10-digit hotline number.) And it appears to be working.

Yesterday, I peppered Ellen with emails about the study, and about what she learned from it.

A mental health crisis center in Houston in 2022. Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

A success story

Sam: I guess what I’d like to know is, What surprised you most about the findings?

Ellen: Ordinarily, it’s difficult to prove how much a single factor contributed to the positive trend in youth suicides after 2022. But the authors came up with ingenious ways to isolate the 988 effect. It turned out suicides went down quite a lot more in states where people used 988 more. Then the authors tried to exclude other explanations: Did suicide rates drop as much among people over 65, who are less likely to use 988? They did not. Did they go down in England, where there was no hotline change? They did not. Also — I was just grateful to report some good news.

Were we in a youth suicide crisis during the coronavirus pandemic?

Youth suicide rates peaked in 2021, after going up and up and up for years. Since then there has been a gradual decline. One expert I spoke to, Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth of the JED Foundation, said that peak rate may have been abnormally high, with a specific cohort of young people who were the first to encounter social media in adolescence and then hit hard by pandemic shutdowns. She said part of the reason for the drop in youth suicide is a regression to the mean.

Do you have any sense of what the exchanges between callers and the hotline look like?

The journalist Jason Cherkis worked on a 988 hotline for about a year. The calls were often from people who had no one to talk to: Caregivers for parents with dementia, or lonely young men in rural areas, or older people angry about how their lives had turned out. “You search for the threads of their life that they can hold onto, the kindling,” he said. It was draining, but also deeply satisfying. “I’m just trying to help this stranger,” he said. “All you have to do is listen.”

Last summer the Trump administration stopped one element of the hotline, the Press 3 option for L.G.B.T.Q.+ callers. It said the hotline would “no longer silo” services to that community and “focus on serving all help seekers.” Then Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this week that the agency would restore Press 3. Is that a big deal?

Yes! While Press 3 was active, it made up almost 10 percent of all 988 calls.

Read Ellen’s story about the success of 988 here.

THE LATEST NEWS

War in the Middle East

President Trump said Israel and Lebanon had agreed to extend their cease-fire by three weeks. The countries’ leaders didn’t comment, and today, Israel said it had struck Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. Trump said he’d ordered the Navy to “shoot and kill any boat” laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict is becoming a test of wills between Iran and the U.S., Anton Troianovski writes. The U.S. drained its supplies of costly weapons fighting Iran, officials say. Some estimates put the price of the war at nearly $1 billion a day. Iran’s new ayatollah does not exert absolute power, as his slain father did. Instead, a group of Revolutionary Guards generals is effectively running the country. The world’s largest condom maker is raising prices by up to 30 percent because the war affects its raw materials supplies.

Politics

A naturalization ceremony in New Jersey. Kent J. Edwards/Reuters

The Justice Department told prosecutors to revoke the citizenship of hundreds of foreign-born Americans, according to a U.S. official. The department also loosened legal restrictions for medical marijuana. A soldier used classified information to bet on Nicolás Maduro’s ouster in Venezuela, the U.S. said. Trump’s disapproval rating has hit 58 percent, according to a Times analysis of polling. That’s a high for his second term. Trump shared a podcast episode in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places. A “MAHA” coalition of vaccine skeptics, organic moms and environmental activists helped elect Trump. But some are disillusioned and might not turn out again. Trump said he is renovating the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, which he called “filthy.”

Around the World

Ruman Radev on Bulgaria’s election night this week. Spasiyana Sergieva/Reuters

Bulgaria: Rumen Radev, whose party won recent elections by a landslide, has made pro-Russian statements. Bulgarians wonder how he will approach the E.U. European Union: Leaders unblocked a $106 billion loan to Ukraine after Hungary, where new leadership is incoming, dropped its opposition. Vatican: On a papal tour, Pope Leo tried to speak about injustice in Africa. Many of his comments were interpreted as criticism of Trump.

Business

Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders backed Paramount’s acquisition of the company. The deal still needs regulatory approval. Meta plans to cut 10 percent of its work force, about 8,000 employees, in an A.I. push.

Other Big Stories

LaGuardia Airport’s failure to put transponders on emergency vehicles contributed to a fatal runway collision last month, a preliminary report found. The F.D.A. approved a gene therapy that can cure a rare form of deafness. The treatment is the first to restore normal hearing in children who were born deaf.

AN UNPOPULAR PLAN

A photograph released by the U.S. Army showing Afghans in Qatar in 2021. U.S. Army, via Getty Images

American soldiers fought the Taliban in Afghanistan for 20 years. Hundreds of thousands of locals risked their lives to help the American war effort.

Many of those people evacuated to the U.S. for their own safety once the Americans left in 2021. But the U.S. government sent a group of 1,100 to a military base in Qatar, promising them a path to U.S. settlement if they passed further checks.

That’s not what happened. The U.S. is working on a plan that would force Afghans to choose between returning to their country under Taliban rule and being sent to Congo, an African nation suffering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. “Now we are stuck between bad and worse options,” one of the refugees told The Times.

U.S. lawmakers in both parties are unhappy with the plan. “We made promises to those fighting by our side to bring them to the U.S.,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said. “We should keep our promises.”

OPINIONS

Matthew Connors spent 13 years photographing authoritarian regimes and those who fight them. See his images.

Here’s a column by Michelle Goldberg on Tucker Carlson’s criticism of Trump.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

The B’nei Menashe community in India’s Manipur state. Atul Loke for The New York Times

Exodus: A community in India believes it is one of ancient Israel’s Ten Lost Tribes. They’re trying to move to modern Israel.

Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about one striking image from Lebanon.

Celebrated conductor: Michael Tilson Thomas made the San Francisco Symphony a model of collegial music-making, artistic adventurousness and community engagement. He died at 81.

TODAY’S NUMBER

35

— That is the minimum number of peregrine falcon pairs nesting in New York City. They live on the George Washington Bridge and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and on buildings up and down Manhattan. (Look, I like birds.) Meet one of their chicks, residing outside the 14th floor of an office building in the Financial District.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: The Las Vegas Raiders took Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza with the top pick in the N.F.L. Draft. “I can’t wait to learn,” he said on the call. See his family’s reaction.

Premier League: Liam Rosenior lasted just 107 days as head coach of Chelsea. Go inside his disastrous tenure.

FIFA: The 2026 World Cup is supposed to bring millions of visitors and billions of dollars to North America this summer. With two months to go, that boom hasn’t materialized.

Soccer: New research reveals troubling data about the impact on the brain of performing “headers.”

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Craig Lee for The New York Times

I like to make French toast on the weekend. It marks a departure from morning weekday cereal bolted while standing over the sink. And I like this recipe for French toast amandine because it’s luxurious, even sublime. Cover everything with butter and maple syrup, and serve with sliced fruit. (I’m seeing some good strawberries these days.) This could become your Saturday routine.

TRAVEL DIARY

Yewande Komolafe Courtney Yates

A few years ago, my colleague Yewande Komolafe, a food writer, lost her legs and all but one of her fingers to the ravages of sickle cell disease. The amputations left her feeling like a tourist in her body and in New York, where she has lived for nearly 20 years. So she decided to become one — and rediscovered her city in a wheelchair. Come tag along.

More on culture

Bad news for the Metropolitan Opera in New York: The Saudi government backed out of a deal that would have brought it $200 million as it struggles to recover from an acute financial crisis. The Dutta brothers built Aicon Gallery in New York into one of the few high-profile American dealerships of South Asian art, a segment of the market that has been growing even as price tags for other blue-chip artworks began to drop. But boy oh boy do these brothers dislike each other. Jacob Bernstein tells the tale of an infinite feud. Jimmy Kimmel had a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Read “A Violent Masterpiece,” Jordan Harper’s latest novel. Sarah Weinman, who writes a crime and mystery column for The New York Times Book Review, says it really is a violent masterpiece, a Los Angeles rager, the noir novel for our times.

Learn how well you will age. Take this quiz.

Try a tool that intentionally messes up your writing. It’s a response to A.I. making email sound less human.

Illuminate your garden, deck, fire escape or tent with one of the outdoor LED lanterns recommended by the nighthawks at Wirecutter.

Take our news quiz.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was unequaled.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. Have a great weekend. — Sam

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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

[phkrause]

April 25, 2026

Good morning. Our lives are governed by wondrous phenomena that we don’t often stop to consider — but we’re missing out.

María Jesús Contreras

High lights

	By Melissa Kirsch

I saw the northern lights by accident one late summer night, driving with a friend on an unpopulated stretch of highway that sliced through North Dakota cornfields. Against a canvas of total darkness, something like an acid cityscape sprang up around our car, electric green towers and skyscrapers, spanning the space between the road and heaven. It was one of the most exciting things I’d ever experienced. We stopped the car and ran out into the fields, trying to get closer to the light, trying to somehow touch these pulsating columns of color that arrived from nowhere and now formed a simultaneously real and impossible landscape.

The northern lights were on my mind this week after I read a story in New Scientist about Karl Lemstrom, a Finnish scientist who, in the late 19th century, tried to create a replica of the aurora borealis with a complex copper-wire apparatus meant to channel electricity in the atmosphere. He had the mechanism wrong — the aurora is caused by an interaction between charged particles from the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field — but he was able to produce some luminosity from his wire construction, likely something akin to St. Elmo’s fire. He believed, until his death, that his experiments had yielded auroras.

Scientists have come a long way since Lemstrom’s time, but they’re still trying to wrap their heads around auroras. The Times reported on a new 10,000-antenna radar system in Norway that aims to help us understand their finer points — like what accounts for the variations in density, and why they move. Each time I read about electromagnetism, I manage to absorb just enough to be sufficiently awed by it. I collect electromagnetic facts, keepsakes that I polish and wonder about: Birds can sense Earth’s magnetic field, which helps them with navigation. Sharks use electroreception to detect the tiny movements of prey. Our own bodies are pulsing with electrical signals.

Knowing that the spectacle of the northern lights occurs because of electromagnetism doesn’t help to explain the feeling I had that night in the cornfield, the deep gratitude I felt for days afterward. I kept thinking about how we’d gone from total darkness to pyrotechnics in an instant. I had this feeling that there was magic in the world around me, that beauty could emerge from nothingness and I didn’t have to do anything to summon it. I just had to be there in a rented pickup truck, driving from Chicago to Calgary on an ordinary September night.

Reading about Lemstrom’s experiments, I wanted to romanticize him, to make him into a dreamer. He was a scientist, but in my imagination he was also a poet, a man who approached an inconceivably large phenomenon and tried to wrangle it into a form he could experience on his own terms.

I think most people are like me in that they don’t often contemplate the elemental forces that act on us every second of our lives. We don’t consider electromagnetism; we don’t sit and marvel at the very fact of gravity. We take these things for granted because we have no reason not to, and because they’re so complicated that we fear that our limited brains, the brains that are still trying to work out what to have for lunch, will be totally hopeless to understand.

But we don’t have to. These forces are going to do what they do whether we consider them or not. And how cool is that? Gravity is going to continue to keep you grounded to the earth. The northern lights are going to continue to erect their phantom architecture from the Great Plains to the Blue Lagoon. And we don’t have to do anything at all to make it happen. We don’t have to understand it in order to experience it. How lucky are we?

THE LATEST NEWS

Trump Administration

Jerome Powell Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Justice Department dropped its investigation into Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair. The decision could clear the way for the confirmation of Kevin Warsh, President Trump’s pick to lead the central bank. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is pushing investigations into Trump’s adversaries in an attempt to win his job permanently. The Trump administration, as part of an effort to revive capital punishment, will reinstitute firing squads as an allowed form of execution. An appeals court said Trump cannot categorically deny asylum claims from people crossing from Mexico into the U.S. The annual White House Correspondents Dinner is tonight, hosted by the celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman. Trump is expected to attend for the first time in his presidency. (Related: The Times reports on the event but does not buy seats at the party, a policy that dates back nearly 20 years.) Importers have begun applying for refunds from Trump’s tariff policies. In the video below, Tony Romm, an economics reporter, explains why consumers are unlikely to see much of that money returned to their own pockets. Click to play.

Who’s Getting a Tariff Refund? The New York Times

War in the Middle East

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are traveling to Pakistan today to hold peace talks with Iranian officials. While Kushner and Witkoff have traveled the world on Trump’s behalf, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has mostly stayed home, focusing on his second job as national security adviser. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, revealed that he had undergone treatment for prostate cancer. He said he kept his diagnosis private for months to prevent Iran from using it as “propaganda.”

Other Big Stories

Maine’s governor vetoed a bill that would have banned the construction of new data centers in the state, which would have been the first law of its kind in the U.S. Camp Mystic, the Texas camp where 27 children and counselors died in catastrophic flooding last year, may be denied a license to reopen this summer. Two large wildfires in southeast Georgia have destroyed more than 120 structures and scorched tens of thousands of acres, the governor said.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

Music

The Cascio siblings: from left, Dominic, Aldo, Marie Nicole and Eddie. The New York Times

The Cascio siblings were Michael Jackson’s “second family,” standing by him for years as he was accused of molesting children. Now, they say Jackson sexually abused them, too. (Related: A new biopic of Jackson, produced by his estate, flattens its subject to scrub his reputation, our critic writes.) The Stagecoach Festival, which takes place on the same grounds as Coachella, is becoming the place to see ’90s alt rock. Noah Kahan’s 2022 album, “Stick Season,” made him a star. On his new album, “The Great Divide,” he sings with a sharper, more mature perspective.

Film and TV

More than 20 seasons into its influential run, the cooking competition series “Top Chef” is getting less heated and more touchy-feely. Some documentaries introduce you to people; others cast fresh light on them. But a new Leonard Bernstein documentary doesn’t say anything new — instead, it makes an argument about music.

More Culture

The museum-quality art collection of Condé Nast’s late owner, S.I. Newhouse Jr., is coming up for auction. The sale is expected to bring in more than $450 million. Sam Pinkleton’s new Broadway revival of “The Rocky Horror Show” gives us the big gay mayhem we want without letting things get too out of hand, our theater critic writes.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

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RECIPE OF THE WEEK

Julia Gartland for The New York Times

By Melissa Clark

Easy Chocolate Cake

It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I’ve got cake on my mind, particularly Yossy Arefi’s easy chocolate cake with its billowing bittersweet frosting. The American-style buttercream, made with powdered sugar, is a snap to put together, no fussy double boilers needed. It’s the perfect topping to cover the moist cocoa and sour cream layers. You don’t need a birthday as an excuse to make this simple cake, just the desire to treat yourself and the people you love.

T MAGAZINE

Photographs by Roe Ethridge. Styled by Stella Greenspan

Read the Culture issue of T, The Times’s style magazine.

REAL ESTATE

Gabe Lehman, Elana Maslow, Aviva Maslow with Aurora, and Noah Orgish in Berkeley, Calif. Jason Henry for The New York Times

The Hunt: Two sisters and their husbands banded together to afford a home in the Bay Area’s notoriously expensive housing market. What did they find? Play our game.

What you get for $500,000: A bungalow in Mobile, Ala. A condominium above a storefront in Portland, Maine. A Craftsman in Astoria, Ore.

An extension, miles away: A growing family wanted more space, but also to keep their historic home. The solution? A “courtyard house.”

Celebrity pads: Lily Allen, Drew Barrymore and Pete Davidson have all recently listed homes in the New York area. Take a look inside.

LIVING

Artwork by Ester Partegàs

Pops of color: A design magazine editor balances bright shades with bright white in his Madrid apartment.

Wag-who? The “wagyu” label used to guarantee quality beef. Here’s what you’re paying for today.

Breakfast buffet: Popular chains like IHOP and Cracker Barrel are cashing in on catering.

Wonder drug? MAHA influencers are spinning nicotine as a “natural” health hack.

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Protect yourself from tick bites

As you start to venture outdoors this season, there are a few effective steps you can take to prevent tick bites. First: Cover up. For hiking, gardening, camping and the like, limit exposed skin by wearing a long-sleeved shirt, a hat and long pants (even better when they’re tucked into socks). Consider treating your clothes with permethrin, or buying pretreated garments. And for skin that does remain bare, try a picaridin-based spray, which is less oily and smelly than ones with DEET. Finally, once you’re back inside, use a lint roller to wipe all your clothes (and pets!) down. Check everywhere on your body for critters. And we really mean everywhere. — Doug Mahoney

GAME OF THE WEEK

The Sabres’ Alex Tuch and the Bruins’ Viktor Arvidsson. Brian Fluharty/Imagn Images via Reuters Connect

Buffalo Sabres vs. Boston Bruins, N.H.L. playoffs: If you’re looking to join a bandwagon for the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Sabres invite you to hop on. Buffalo has reached the postseason for the first time in 15 years, breaking the longest drought in N.H.L. history. And the city’s long-suffering fans are eating it up: In Game 1, when the Sabres scored four goals in the final eight minutes, the arena was rocking. “If there was a chance at bringing the building down, they were going to try,” said Lindy Ruff, the Sabres’ head coach, who has lived in Buffalo for nearly 50 years.

Since then, Buffalo and Boston has each won one more. The Sabres have some things to improve on, The Athletic notes: They have given up the first goal in each game this series, and they’ve now gone 35 straight power plays without scoring. But they keep finding a way to win.

Game 4 is tomorrow at 2 p.m. Eastern on TNT

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was abandoning.

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

[phkrause]

April 26, 2026

Good morning. Investigators are searching for a motive after a shooting in the hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was taking place last night. President Trump was unharmed.

At the Washington Hilton last night. Salwan Georges for The New York Times

Trump was rushed offstage after a man armed with a shotgun, a handgun and knives charged a security checkpoint. Gunfire rang out just after the dinner began, and Trump, the first lady and hundreds of journalists looked up from their conversations. “Shots fired,” a member of the Secret Service shouted. Then agents, their guns drawn, sprinted to reach the president. Guests dressed in gowns and tuxedos hid under their seats. See the dramatic video.

The man was tackled by law enforcement officers and was taken into custody. A Secret Service officer was shot but was “saved” by his bulletproof vest, Trump said.

Trump posted two images of a man he said was the attacker being detained. He also posted surveillance footage on social media of a man making a mad dash through the cavernous halls of the hotel.

Trump held a news conference in the White House briefing room later last night, still dressed in his tuxedo and bow tie, to talk about the events of the evening.

“Well, thank you very much,” he said. “That was very unexpected!”

Melania Trump stood near him, looking stoic. The president said that it was “a rather traumatic experience for her.”

President Trump at the White House last night. Salwan Georges for The New York Times

Here’s what else we know.

The suspect: Two law enforcement officials have identified Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., as the suspect in the shooting. Federal authorities surrounded his home late Saturday.

At the hotel: See maps of the gunman’s movements inside the Washington Hilton, where the dinner was taking place.

Inside the ballroom: Attendees dropped to the floor, crouching beside chairs and ducking under tables as a sense of danger spread through the room.

Party postponed: Trump said that he had hoped to continue the dinner, because he didn’t want “sick people” to “change the fabric of our life,” but that he ultimately decided to reschedule it. Some afterparties, however, continued as scheduled.

Security threats: After two previous assassination attempts against Trump, this latest incident is reigniting the conversation about political violence in the U.S.

Follow the latest news of the shooting here.

THE LATEST NEWS

The Middle East

Trump abruptly canceled a trip to Pakistan by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner yesterday afternoon and told the Iranians that they could negotiate over the phone. Though talks with Washington remained up in the air, Iranian negotiators were expected to head back to Islamabad today. The fragile truce in Lebanon has been extended, but Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade attacks. The U.S. introduced more sanctions targeting Iran’s “shadow fleet.”

Around the World

In Japan. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Japan: Sumo wrestlers and M.M.A. fighters are being recruited to work at nursing homes. Israel: The country’s president has decided not to pardon Benjamin Netanyahu in his long-running corruption trial, officials said. Nepal: “Icefall doctors” are trying to break through glacial ice that is keeping hundreds of climbers from reaching the top of Mount Everest. Ukraine: The Chernobyl disaster took place 40 years ago today. Now Ukrainian soldiers are using the area as a training ground for the war against Russia.

Other Big Stories

Immigrants to the U.S. can now be denied a green card for expressing political opinions, including criticism of Israel. The largest measles outbreak in recent U.S. history was declared over today. The outbreak in South Carolina sickened nearly 1,000 people.

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Britain passed a law that aims to permanently ban the sale of tobacco products to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2009, with the goal of creating a “smoke-free generation.” Will this ban be effective?

Yes. It will prevent people from picking up the habit, and it will help smokers who are trying to quit do so, Sarah Woolnough writes for the King’s Fund, a British public health think tank: “Generations of smokers have been recruited as children, with four in five starting before the age of 20.”

No. It will push people to buy tobacco on the black market and create two different classes of adults, writes Reem Ibrahim writes for Reason: “Smoking is harmful, but adults ought to be free to weigh risks, make decisions for themselves and live with the consequences.”

FROM OPINION

The Cuban artist and activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is in prison for speaking out against his government. “My survival and my ongoing work as an artist are symbols of hope,” he writes.

Officials should combat growing vaccine skepticism with stricter exemption requirements and more communication of their effectiveness, the editorial board writes.

Here is a column by Ross Douthat on Elon Musk and the SAVE America Act.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato

Leading the way: Want to know where men’s fashion is heading? Look to Japan.

Apocalypse, now? Why do so many Americans believe in the rapture?

Philosopher’s Stone: The rich and powerful hope, and perhaps even believe, that death might be eradicated.

Land bridge: A new idea to save the climate? Dam the Bering Strait, the narrow waterway between Russia and Alaska.

A Foreign Service officer: Lionel Rosenblatt led a mission to help evacuate South Vietnamese citizens from Saigon days before the city fell in 1975. He died at 82.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: The Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Ravens and Philadelphia Eagles appear to be the biggest winners of the draft, while the Carolina Panthers, San Francisco 49ers and Jacksonville Jaguars made head-scratching selections.

M.L.B.: The Boston Red Sox fired its manager, Alex Cora, shortly after beating the Baltimore Orioles 17-1 in the team’s most lopsided win of the season.

N.H.L.: The postseason used to be known for brawls on the ice and trash talk off it. Now the game has changed — for the better if you like skill and talent, but for the worse, if you’re a fan who used to revel in the hatred.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

	By Elisabeth Egan

“The Ending Writes Itself” by Evelyn Clarke: Seven authors converge on a private island at the behest of a famous mystery writer, believing they’ve been invited to a literary salon. It turns out, their host is dead and the real agenda for the weekend consists of finishing his final book. “There’s a reason the closed-circle mystery is so beloved,” our reviewer wrote. “A good thriller is all about stakes, and locking up your suspects (and victims) in one space and throwing away the key is a surefire way to send those stakes sky-high.” Clarke, who is actually two people — V.E. Schwab (“The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue”) and Cat Clarke (“Girlhood,” “Entangled”) — pulls this off this publishing satire with aplomb. Read our review.

THE INTERVIEW

Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

	By David Marchese

This week’s subject for The Interview is Bob Odenkirk, who’s gone from a sketch comedy hero to a dramatic actor to an action star. His new movie, “Normal,” is in theaters.

What comedy speaks to you now?

Honestly, the comedy that speaks to me most right now is a thing called “On Cinema.” It’s a pretend movie review show that’s on the internet by my friend Tim Heidecker. This is kind of a sketch comic thing, drawn out and slowed down. I think sketch comedy, I’m sorry to say, is the most profound expression of human existence there is.

Really?

I don’t think any Kubrick movie or Freudian analysis or ——

Shakespeare?

Or Shakespeare, says as much about how humans operate and what is the ultimate problem with us as a species than sketch comedy. I wish it was not true. I wish that we were worthy of being taken apart and observed in subtle and complex ways. But I don’t think so. I think that ultimately there is nothing more profound about people than you can say in a sketch. They’re [expletive] idiots! People are sadly limited, so limited that you can define them and you can share everything that’s important about them in four minutes.

Maybe this is related: Near the end of your memoir, you write that show business is not curing cancer and that it’s a distraction, “which is inarguably key to life on earth because life on Earth is so bleak and painful and the only and best response to that is to LOOK AWAY!”

Yeah. [Long pause] You want me to repudiate that statement?

I wondered if you were being sarcastic when you wrote that. It struck me as ——

Bleak?

Pretty bleak.

Too sad? I don’t know what to say, man. I pretty much do think that’s true. Obviously, there’s joy and reward in being alive and in the ways in which we look away to transform that horror — the horror, the horror — into something good, entertaining, comforting to another person, that’s beautiful. That’s the joy of life: turning [expletive] into gold. Comedy gold, whatever gold you can make it into. To me, that’s the good part.

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 …

Ants!!! These are the best baits and poisons to get them out of your house, fast.

Print documents with a top-tier laser printer. You won’t have to fret about jams, error messages and wasted cartridges.

MEAL PLAN

Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.

Food is expensive, but the price of eggs is way down from its peak. If you love scrambled eggs (or feel you could, with the right recipe), Emily Weinstein recommends this recipe from Kenji López-Alt. It uses cornstarch to create a creaminess you can’t get from other methods. Or, if you’re looking for a higher-effort dinner this week, she also has recipes for sweet-and-savory skillet chicken, spicy ground turkey with snap peas and more.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were oenophile and pinhole.

Can you put eight historical events — including the founding of Apple, the “I Have a Dream” speech and the first dunce cap — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

[phkrause]

April 27, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. The suspect in the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting wrote a note listing Trump administration officials as targets, officials said. (Here’s everything else we know about the shooting.) King Charles III and Queen Camilla are bound for Washington. They’re meant to have tea at the White House this afternoon.

And in news from the farmers’ market, we’re in that narrow window of spring in New York when the only ingredient food people talk about is ramps.

There’s more news below. But I’m going to start today with gold.

Gold from a Colombian drug cartel mine. Federico Rios for The New York Times

Gold standards

Investors buy gold when the world seems unstable — when people worry about stocks and inflation. A gold-buying frenzy has followed nearly every financial meltdown, major terrorist attack or war in the last 25 years.

Why? Gold is steady. It endures. It holds its value — indeed, its value grows. With conflicts raging in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere, the price of gold now hovers around $5,000 an ounce. That is roughly four times what it was a decade ago.

And the United States is at the center of that marketplace:

Every year, the United States Mint sells more than $1 billion of investment-grade gold coins. Each is stamped with an icon like the bald eagle, signifying the government’s guarantee, required by law, that the gold is 100 percent American.

But that’s not true. “The Mint is actually the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined,” according to an investigation by Justin Scheck, Simón Posada and Federico Rios:

The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.

Guardrails that were meant to prevent human rights abuses in the mining of gold across the globe have collapsed. “As prices climb ever higher,” my colleagues write, “wealthy buyers are actually helping to create the very instability they are trying to hedge against.”

Digging for gold in Colombia. Federico Rios for The New York Times

That instability is everywhere, they report. Gold mining funds the brutal civil war in Sudan and helped pay for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The high prices have helped both Venezuela and Iran survive financial sanctions. The biggest drug cartel in Colombia, the Clan del Golfo, mines gold and uses the proceeds to maintain its murderous control over swaths of the country. Terrorist groups are getting into the gold business, too.

But for decades the Mint has looked the other way as gold from foreign sources, some unethical or illegal, has entered its plant in West Point, N.Y., to be melted down and made into coins that are legally required to be made of U.S. gold.

All ‘American’

Gold being poured into a bar in Medellín, Colombia. Federico Rios for The New York Times

To discover the alchemy that transforms illegally mined gold into American bullion, the reporters traveled to the tropical lowlands of northwestern Colombia, in the heart of Clan del Golfo territory. They visited an illegal mining area controlled by the cartel, part of which was on a military base. And they visited the nearby town of Caucasia, where miners sell what they dig. (For the privilege of mining, selling and buying gold there, everyone involved kicks back money to the cartel.) It’s brutal, dangerous, toxic and illegal work.

But once the buyers melt down what they’ve bought and have entered the purchases into ledgers — presto, the gold is legal. No one looks beyond the paperwork. Eventually, it comes to a refinery in Texas to mix with molten gold from other suppliers (from foreign mines, American jewelry resellers, Peruvian pawn shops). There, it follows the transitive property of American gold: Whatever its origin, once it enters an American cauldron, the gold industry considers the metal American.

The Treasury Department has known about this problem for years. The issue came up during President Trump’s first administration. It came up again during the Biden presidency and, in 2024, that administration said it was just months away from publishing new plans for investigating gold sources. It never happened.

Federal law requires coins like this to be minted from only newly mined American gold. Federico Rios for The New York Times

A Treasury spokeswoman told The Times that the Trump administration is now taking steps to track the Mint’s gold sources. But it, too, has not released a plan.

Read here about what happened after Times reporters found a cartel mine on a military base.

THE LATEST NEWS

Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting

At the White House correspondents’ dinner. Salwan Georges for The New York Times

Those who knew the suspect in the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting described him as seeming to be a “completely average guy.” Conspiracy theories have flooded social media after the shooting. The guests at the dinner included many whose lives had previously been affected by gun violence, including Trump, Erika Kirk and Representative Steve Scalise, who was shot at a congressional baseball game practice in 2017. People online asked why one man at the dinner seemed unbothered, while other guests dropped to the floor. He said he wasn’t scared (“I’m a New Yorker”). He also said he didn’t want to get on the ground (“I’m a hygiene freak”). The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was a video of the shooting unfolding.

War in Ukraine

Kim Jong-un opened a memorial for North Korean troops killed in the war in Ukraine. It’s a sign his relationship with Russia is getting stronger. Europe is preparing for a longer war in Ukraine because Trump is preoccupied by Iran.

Around the World

Britain: King Charles III and Queen Camilla are scheduled to arrive in Washington today for a state visit. See photos of past royal visits. Zambia: The death toll from AIDS there is rising, a year after the U.S. cut funding for an H.I.V. prevention program.

Other Big Stories

Oprah signed a multiyear deal with Amazon to make video podcasts based on her Favorite Things and Book Club brands. The U.S. military said it had attacked another boat in the eastern Pacific, killing three people. The death toll from such strikes is now at least 185.

OPINIONS

Electricity-hungry data centers could help everyday Americans if their needs spur investment in the aging grid, Robinson Meyer writes.

Here’s a column by David French on how Ukraine has shown us the future of war and diplomacy.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

In Fujiyoshida, Japan. Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times

Crowd control: Visitors who throng Mount Fuji’s foothills during cherry blossom season are disrupting life there. Locals are fighting back.

Stretched thin: It costs so much to have kids that some Americans are rethinking their plans to start a family.

Metropolitan Diary: A clown on the 5 train.

Verses: It’s National Poetry Month. In the video below, Greg Cowles, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, recommends some poetry books while writing poems with fridge magnets. Click to play.

The New York Times

TODAY’S NUMBER

2

— That is how many miles under the sea scientists sent a robot to recover a mysterious golden orb affixed to a rock. It is also the number of years that it took for researchers to identify the blob. Was it coral? A sea sponge? An alien? Find out.

NOAA Ocean Exploration, Seascape Alaska

SPORTS

London Marathon: Sabastian Sawe won the men’s race, in the first world-record-eligible race time under two hours: 1:59:30. On the women’s side, Tigst Assefa broke her own world record, finishing in 2:15:41, nine seconds faster than her win last year.

M.L.B.: Boston Red Sox players denounced the team’s firing of its manager, Alex Cora. The owner, John Henry, hasn’t explained the move.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne.

There’s a classic Japanese side dish called gomaae — blanched spinach tossed in a rich sesame dressing. Hetty Lui McKinnon developed a variation — asparagus gomaae with chilled tofu — that levels the dish up to entree status, especially if you serve it alongside a bowl of rice. The preparation’s fairly straightforward. Just make sure to have the pan ripping hot when you sear the asparagus. You want to get a nice, quick char on the outside, without overcooking the earthy grassiness within.

PREGNANT PAUSES

Ashley Padilla The New York Times

Jason Zinoman, our comedy critic, takes a close look at what he calls the Padilla Pause — the “S.N.L.” star Ashley Padilla’s way of extending a bit of comic business, and extending it and extending it until what could be a routine joke becomes something stranger and more absurd.

“Some say that comic timing is innate,” Zinoman writes. “You either have it or you don’t. But that is too simplistic. It’s also the result of calculation and choices, a willingness to take risks.” And Padilla takes a lot of them.

More on culture

The people who obsess most about men’s wear, including our fashion reporter Jacob Gallagher, can’t stop talking about a few newish-to-the-West labels from Japan that are making simple, understandable, familiar clothing — with extra care and extravagant attention to detail. “Basic though these clothes appear,” Jacob writes, “their hook is that they’re opulent to the touch, elevated in their fabrication.” T, our style magazine, has a video series called “My Favorite Song.” In the latest, the actress Greta Lee talks about the Beck song that played while she walked down the aisle at her wedding. It’s super L.A.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

That party you were invited to? It may not be real. Jack Nisberg/Condé Nast, via Getty Images

Beware unexpected online invitations to parties that sound awesome. A new phishing scam uses very realistic fakes.

Prevent dangerous trips and slips at home. Almost 80 percent of falls that require emergency care occur indoors. Start by stabilizing your rugs.

Drink a grape soda this week. When did you last have one? Paired with a hero and consumed outside, the grape summons a taste of delight and nostalgia. Mine left me smiling.

Take our news quiz.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was intricacy.

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

[phkrause]

April 28, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Who’s the greatest?

Good morning. You know what’s a good way to start a conversation that’s going to last a while? Publish a list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. The Times just did that.

First, we polled hundreds of pop stars, critics, historians, industry executives, D.J.s, music supervisors and choreographers. They gave us 700 names. (Look at some of their ballots.) Then, during long and often heated conversations, six Times music writers edged the list down to 30 artists.

And now we need to talk about it! There’s much to discuss. Because, sure, Bob Dylan’s on the list, and Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen, too. But Billy Joel didn’t make the cut. Nor did Garth Brooks or Randy Newman. Yes to Stevie Wonder. No to Stevie Nicks. Everyone’s going to have feelings about this. Everyone’s going to cheer for some, bark at others, harrumph in complaint or declare vindication. (I was bummed about Nicks, but the methodology’s sound. Here’s how they did it.)

What I like most about the project is the language behind the critical reasoning, the way enthusiasm can transform into concrete, and convincing, argument.

Take the river of hits Lionel Richie produced from the late 1970s into the mid-80s: “His litany of urgently treacly smashes was the soundtrack of that era,” writes Jon Caramanica. It was both an update of Brill Building songwriting and “a cool and controlled reimagining of the sensual soul music of the late ’60s through the mid-70s.”

Or Lana Del Rey: “Everybody wants to sound like her, but no one else can quite replicate the particular sonic grammar of her writing, which unfurls like an intimate dispatch from the blurry edge of sleep and wakefulness,” writes Lindsay Zoladz.

I like to luxuriate in arguments like these. Here are three now.

Taylor Swift

She had it right from the start, Joe Coscarelli writes, from the first verse of the first song of her first album: “He said the way my blue eyes shined / Put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said, ‘That’s a lie.’”

Swift was 16. And in the two decades since, over 12 studio albums and hundreds of songs, she’s distilled big feelings alongside melodies that worm their way into your brain. Joe’s definitive about it:

Swift has done as much as anyone in modern popular music history to advance the idea of the song — its construction and impact, its tensions and limitations — as an important art form. But she has also done it while foregrounding the agency and emotional lives of young women, and as a result has become probably the most pored-over writer — or at least up there with J.K. Rowling and the pope — of the 21st century in any medium.

Swift gave us a rare interview about the craft of songwriting. Watch it here. It’s good: “There’s a difference between art and, like, going and ranting on an Instagram Live. Like, there’s a difference. This is a song. This takes craft, this takes skill, this takes expertise.”

The New York Times

Jay-Z

Jay-Z’s been a grown-up his whole career, writes Jody Rosen — a tactician, wise and worldly, dazzling in his storytelling:

Jay-Z’s verses stacked up rhymes in intricate configurations — end rhymes, internal rhymes, half-rhymes, even nonrhymes that he twisted into rhymes through tricks of inflection. The language was dense, full of puns and double and triple entendres, but Jay’s delivery was easeful, conversational; he rapped slightly behind the beat, giving the songs a subtle swing, a feeling of relaxed authority that lent credibility to tales of street hustling and forecasts of glory.

I wasn’t in the room, but I’d like to think he walked onto the list with swagger and ease: “Brooklyn you nursed me / Schooled me with hard knocks, better than Berkeley.”

Diane Warren

You may not know her name, but you’ve absolutely heard her songs: “Rhythm of the Night” for DeBarge; “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” for Starship; “If I Could Turn Back Time” for Cher; “Un-Break My Heart” for Toni Braxton; “Say Don’t Go” with Taylor Swift. Thirty-three of Warren’s songs have made it to the Billboard Top 10. Nine hit No. 1.

Wesley Morris makes an excellent case for her greatness:

Warren practices a kind of off-the-rack designer extremism: I want you, I need you, you saved me, you left me, you found me, be gone, come back, you got me, you got this, I got me. She downplays anything much more specific because her music trusts its interpreters. The songs are silhouettes for a vocalist to customize, invest in and, in some of the best outcomes, eventually immolate. They’re statements of often perverse confidence.

Explore the list and then vote for your own personal greats.

And while you’re at it, check out our lists of the 21st century’s 100 best books and 100 best movies. We’re building a canon over here.

Now, let’s see what’s happening in the world.

ASK THE MORNING

We want to hear your questions about the news. That means anything The Times covers — maybe the peace talks in the Middle East, or the economics of the A.I. boom, or what’s happening in the midterm elections. We’ll find reporters to answer some for the newsletter.

Send us your questions here.

THE LATEST NEWS

Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting

The Justice Department formally charged the suspect in the shooting with trying to assassinate President Trump. The affidavit describing the charges did not say that the suspect shot a Secret Service agent. Investigators are examining posts from the social media platform Bluesky in search of a motive in the attack. Republicans in Congress argued that the attack is evidence that Trump needs his new White House ballroom. Trump and Melania Trump demanded that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about the dinner, delivered two days before it. (Kimmel said, “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”)

War in the Middle East

Iran made a new offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. lifted its blockade. Trump wasn’t satisfied with it. Hezbollah said it would not give up its weapons after a day of intense Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon.

Politics

Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

King Charles, on the second day of his U.S. visit, will address a joint session of Congress. Staff at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission say they are being pressured to bring politically charged cases, even when there is little evidence.

Around the World

Sarah Mullally, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Pope Leo. Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media, via Reuters

The Vatican: Sarah Mullally — the first female leader of the world’s Anglicans — prayed with Pope Leo. Catholics who support the ordination of women found the meeting encouraging. South Korea: A.I. is making calls to check in on older adults who live alone. One woman said the technology saved her life. Russia: Politicians and influencers are speaking out against the Kremlin’s internet crackdown. It’s a rare expression of political opposition.

Other Big Stories

This week Elon Musk and Sam Altman — once buddies, now enemies — will face off in a California courtroom. At stake: the future of OpenAI. A Massachusetts jury sentenced a woman to six months in jail for unleashing bees to fight an eviction.

OPINIONS

Tucker Carlson’s comments about Israel reflect a troubling turn in the American right, Peter Beinart writes.

Here are columns by Michelle Goldberg on political violence and Thomas Edsall on A.I. and political ads.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

In Minnesota. Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune, via Getty Images

Paddling upstream: Take a journey through the pristine Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.

Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about a mysterious golden blob on the ocean floor.

Images of modern India: Raghu Rai documented life through photographs of major figures like the Dalai Lama, as well as victims of the Bhopal poison gas leak. He died at 83.

Some of Raghu Rai’s photographs. Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos

TODAY’S NUMBER

124

— That is the number of researchers left in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development. More than 1,500 worked there a year ago. Here’s what happened at the office, which studies public health.

SPORTS

W.N.B.A.: Dallas Wings star Paige Bueckers said she had nothing to do with the team selecting her girlfriend, Azzi Fudd, with its No. 1 draft pick.

Track and field: American track star Allyson Felix, 40, is attempting a comeback to compete in the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, her hometown.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Linda Xiao for The New York Times

Pete Wells brought this recipe for Cuban-style black beans to The Times in 2010, and I’ve learned a few things about it since. First, you can make it with canned black beans and it’ll be exactly as delicious as it is if you simmer dried ones into tenderness. Second, you can make it with a jarred sofrito and it will be about half as good as if you cook your own. Serve over rice, ideally with hot sauce and fried sweet plantains. (Which hot sauce? I like one with body, like Tapatio, Frank’s or Texas Pete.)

MICHAEL ON SCREEN

A Michael Jackson fan in Germany. Ebrahim Noroozi/Associated Press

Critics have largely savaged “Michael,” the Michael Jackson biopic. (The BBC called it a “bland and barely competent daytime TV movie.”) But it brought in more than $200 million in ticket sales over the weekend, and fans danced in the aisles. The Times explored the discrepancy, heading to some showings to talk to some of M.J.’s steadfast fans.

More on culture

Jamie Ding, a self-described “faceless bureaucrat” from New Jersey, won 31 games of “Jeopardy” in a row, taking home more than $800,000. His streak ended last night. Now, he’ll return to his hobbies, including running an Instagram account rating General Tso’s chicken with his sister. Late night hosts processed the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

The New York Times

Read the best books of the year (so far).

Consider the small lifestyle changes Times readers made that have had major effects on their health. (I like the guy who now gets off one station early during his subway commute and walks the rest of the way.)

Freeze more food and you’ll waste less of it.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was legalizing.

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

P.S. On Friday, I wrote about my colleague Yewande Komolafe, a food writer who has battled sickle cell disease her whole life. I said she lost her legs and all but one of her fingers to the ravages of that disease. The amputations came about after what she called a series of medical errors during a long hospitalization.

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

[phkrause]

April 29, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. King Charles III gently pushed back against President Trump’s attacks on Britain in a mostly lighthearted speech to Congress yesterday, before repairing to the White House for a state dinner of spring-herbed ravioli and Dover sole. And, once again, the Justice Department secured an indictment against James Comey.

There’s more news below, including a round-table discussion with the cast of “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” I’m starting today with a question, though: Are more people attacking politicians?

From left: At a memorial to Charlie Kirk, a flag flying at half-staff, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro walking in front of his firebombed home. The New York Times

An age of violence?

We’re living in what can feel like a scary, chaotic moment. There have been three attempts on Donald Trump’s life (not counting plots disrupted before they got far enough for an attack). Last year, gunmen killed Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist, and Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota. One man firebombed the Pennsylvania governor’s house. Another broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer.

Has the United States entered a new phase of violent extremism? Sabrina Tavernise, who covers our political life, wanted to find out. She spoke with Sean Westwood, a scholar who tracks acts of political violence and how Americans react to them. Here’s part of their conversation.

Sabrina: Is political violence worse now?

Sean Westwood: If we are looking at the period from 1865 to 1901, three of the nine presidents were assassinated. A comparable rate today would mean that we would have lost two or three sitting presidents since the late 1980s. It’s also the case that in the ’60s and ’70s, there were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and days with multiple bombings by radical domestic groups. That’s just not what we’ve seen in the last two decades.

What does that tell us about the country now?

We should be certainly very worried about political violence and its destabilizing effect, but the country has seen far worse and survived. Part of our doom loop is not necessarily the political violence itself, but the narrative of democratic collapse that comes along with it. And history tells us that isolated incidents of political violence — even the assassination of elected officials or presidents — do not lead to the end of the Republic.

How is political violence today different from the 1960s? Are the perpetrators themselves different? For example, Cole Tomas Allen, the man who was charged in the latest assassination attempt — put him in historical context.

In the 1960s and ’70s, attacks largely came from organized groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. There was structure, there was coherence, there was leadership. Today, there just aren’t networks premised on spreading violence across the country.

The individuals who commit these acts are lone wolves. Largely mentally ill, largely male, largely younger. The thing that seems to connect them is not ideology — it’s anger. A really good example is Thomas Crooks, the first one to try to assassinate President Trump. He was searching for candidates on both sides of the aisle. He just seemed to be lashing out against society. So in that way, Cole Tomas Allen is a bit of an outlier because he did provide a clear explanation for his actions.

But could political violence affect the stability of the country?

The number of incidents of political violence is small — a couple of dozen, maybe three dozen incidents over the four years ending in 2024. But over the same period, we’ve had more than 9,000 religious hate crimes — about 5,700 were antisemitic — and more than 25,000 racial hate crimes.

I would strongly argue that it’s these other cleavages, these other acts of violence, that are hurting us.

Read their whole conversation here.

Related

A federal grand jury charged James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, with making a threat against Trump. The charge stemmed from a photo that Comey posted on social media of seashells arranged to spell out “86 47.” Trump is the 47th president, and “86” is often slang for dismiss or remove. The government ordered a review of all station licenses owned by ABC. Officials said the inquiry was related to D.E.I. policies, though Trump is feuding with Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he told days beforethe White House correspondents’ dinner.

‘DON’T EAT THE SALAD’

Xia Gordon

Those who struggle with their weight often describe experiencing incessant thoughts about food — what to eat, when to eat, how to resist eating. But many people taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, like Ozempic and Wegovy, say that while they take them this “food noise” goes away.

Researchers think they’ve found an explanation for that change. Read more about it here.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

The proposed passport design. U.S. Department of State

The State Department plans to release a limited-edition passport design that includes an image of Trump.

The Homeland Security shutdown, which began as a fight over ICE restrictions, has turned into an intraparty struggle for Republicans. Our congressional editor, Julie Hirschfeld Davis, explains in the video below. Click to watch.

The New York Times

War in Iran

The United Arab Emirates said that to sell more oil and lift its economy it would leave the international oil cartel OPEC. A ship linked to Abu Dhabi appears to be the first fully-loaded natural gas tanker to cross the Strait of Hormuz since the war began. The war has shuttered textile mills in India, grounded planes in Poland and forced energy rationing in Vietnam. But the worst of the economic chaos hasn’t hit the United States.

Royal Visit

Kenny Holston/The New York Times

King Charles won fans in Congress with his praise of the legislative process and his British humor during his speech yesterday. The guest list for the state dinner Trump hosted for Charles and Queen Camilla included Supreme Court justices, Fox News hosts and Jeff Bezos. Today the king and queen will visit the 9/11 Memorial and other sites in New York. They don’t seem to plan to go to California to see Prince Harry.

Around the World

Belarus: The government released five people, including a journalist and a Catholic monk, in a prisoner swap involving several countries. Sri Lanka: Twenty-two Buddhist monks appeared in court accused of smuggling cannabis products from Thailand.

Technology

Brennan Smart for The New York Times

Elon Musk took the stand in a blockbuster trial against OpenAI and Sam Altman. Google will let the Pentagon use its A.I. The Pentagon also has signed deals with OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI amid a dispute with Anthropic, the maker of Claude, over how to use the technology responsibly.

OPINIONS

Trump should not save Spirit airlines, Steven Rattner writes: It’s a failing company that has filed for bankruptcy twice in 10 months.

Footage from ICE patrols shows a pattern of racial profiling. The Supreme Court has allowed it to happen, the editorial board writes.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

Aubrey Patti/NYT Wirecutter

Dumpster diving: Annemarie Conte, one of our colleagues at Wirecutter, spent months exploring trash piles to answer a vexing question: Why do stores throw away so many perfectly good products? 🗑️🤿🪎

Road trip: After three years of landslide-related closures, California’s iconic Highway 1 is fully open again. Take a drive along its tight curves.

Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was The Times’s list of the greatest living American songwriters.

A real-life Agent Mulder: Nick Pope investigated U.F.O. sightings for Britain’s Ministry of Defense, a position that turned him from skeptic to believer and made him one of the world’s most respected ufologists. He died at 60.

TODAY’S NUMBER

30

— That is the estimated percentage of U.S. doctors now using artificial intelligence to document interactions with patients. Just like on “The Pitt”! What could go wrong?

SPORTS

Hockey: The Professional Women’s Hockey League attracted a record number of fans in its third season, with attendance at games topping one million for the first time.

M.L.B.: The Philadelphia Phillies fired Rob Thomson as manager after a 9-19 start to the season.

N.B.A.: Damon Jones, a former player and coach accused of selling insider information to gamblers, pleaded guilty to federal charges.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

Sometimes it’s nice to go old-school in the kitchen and make a quiche Lorraine — though in 1957, when Craig Claiborne started as The Times’s food editor, the recipe was shiny and new, fresh from France, the latest thing. (You can read more about Craig in his obituary, from 2000. I never met him. I think it would have been neat.)

DEVIL’S WORK

The director David Frankel, left, with the cast of “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” Thea Traff for The New York Times

Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci and the director David Frankel talked with The Times about “The Devil Wears Prada,” its sequel and who’s mean in real life. A look at the debate:

STREEP I am a mean person. I don’t have to think, could I do that?

BLUNT [laughing] Do you mean in life, or in the movie?

STREEP In life.

BLUNT Mean as a snake!

TUCCI She’s not mean.

More on culture

The restaurant critic Ligaya Mishan takes a torch to the state of modern sushi: “pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand.” It’s generally delicious. It’s reliably expensive. “It will also be boring.” The recent shuttering of The Washington Post’s Book World, one of the nation’s last free-standing books sections, feels like the end of something larger, writes Dwight Garner, one of our book critics: “It marks an inflection point in America’s literature, which can’t thrive without serious, fervent and quick-witted criticism: public talk, back and forth, between competing voices, in something like real time. The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches.” Still, he’s hopeful. Late night hosts talked about the royal visit.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Noah Kahan performing in February.  Mike Coppola/Getty Images for SiriusXM

Listen to Noah Kahan’s new single, “Porch Light,” on YouTube. Lindsay Zoladz says his perspective has sharpened and matured since “Stick Season,” the 2022 folk-pop hit that made him a star.

Bring power into your workouts, using plyometric exercises to improve your balance and coordination.

Visit the Long Island Maritime Museum in West Sayville, N.Y. Its collection of small, local watercraft — catboats, iceboats and skiffs — is super cool and worth a detour.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were clementine and inclement.

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

[phkrause]

April 30, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, appeared before Congress yesterday to discuss the war in Iran. He said that America’s greatest adversary was “the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans” criticizing the war. And King Charles III and Queen Camilla had a busy day in New York.

There’s more below — including good news for hippos that used to belong to the drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Today’s number is 86. Let me explain.

Outside the courthouse in Virginia where James Comey appeared yesterday.  Andrew Leyden/Getty Images

Under threat

James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., was in federal court yesterday to face a charge that he had threatened to kill President Trump.

Prosecutors say that when Comey posted an image on social media last year, showing seashells arranged on a beach to read “86 47,” it was “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President.” The numbers were a combination of the slang term “86,” which means to remove or get rid of, with an apparent reference to Trump, the country’s 47th president.

Calling “86” a death threat would come as a surprise to anyone who has worked in a restaurant kitchen. The number is jargon that came out of soda fountains in the 1930s, meaning, We’ve run out of that item, so strike it from the menu.

Before I became a journalist, I was a line cook. After I’d fired the final seafood special, say, I’d yell “86 shrimp” to the servers. It meant: Sell no more of those, please. You may know the number from “The Bear,” the restaurant dramedy. Carmy, the chef, 86s the ravioli. (The dish was taking too long to make and putting the kitchen in the weeds.)

Language evolves. Mafia lore allows that “86” means someone needs to be removed, perhaps permanently — though it’s probably not a term you’ll hear on a RICO wiretap. But when the former F.B.I. director posted his seashells, was he really imagining a presidential assassination?

More and more, the government is seeing political criticism as a threat. It is defining the idea of a threat downward. And Trump didn’t start it.

A screenshot of a deleted Instagram post by Comey, the former director of the F.B.I.

A shift in thinking

Why is this happening? I called Devlin Barrett, who has covered federal law enforcement for more than 20 years. “Most lawyers would tell you the ‘86’ case is a very far stretch from the types of threat cases that federal prosecutors generally pursue,” he told me. “It’s an instance where the Trump administration is taking a much more aggressive and elastic use of criminal-threat law and applying it to a phrase where there is plenty of disagreement over what it actually means.”

There’s a surprising reason for this: the Jan. 6 insurrection. A flood of social-media threats had preceded the attack on the Capitol. “There was a push from some quarters, very much including from on the left, to say that there is more threatening behavior out there on the internet than you think, and that it needs to be investigated,” Devlin said. In the years that followed, law enforcement officials tracked more threats all across American life and launched more investigations into those threats.

Then Trump took office — and stuck with the idea. He was particularly focused on punishing political enemies like Comey and thwarting political opponents. Maybe his aides could nab them on charges stemming from their coarse language? Federal prosecutors, Devlin said, are now seeking threat charges “in some pretty flexible and aggressive ways.”

They argued that graffiti with a Hamas symbol near the home of Columbia University’s president threatened her life.

The Justice Department is investigating a protester outside Stephen Miller’s home who pointed her fingers at her eyes and then at Miller’s wife, a kind of I’m-watching-you gesture familiar to anyone who has seen Robert De Niro mugging in “Meet the Parents.” The government says it was a threat. One prosecutor even tried to indict the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, over comments he made five years earlier about Supreme Court justices. (At a political rally, Schumer said that two of them had “released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.” He apologized the next day.) The Justice Department eventually shut this effort down.

Facts vs. law

Let’s return to the internet, though. It is absolutely suffused with hideous language — about politics and about people. (It’s often aimed at my colleagues for their reporting.) And the truth is that some acts of violence really do follow ugly political speech by their perpetrators. So it’s important to look at when the government chooses to prosecute for threatening speech, and why.

As in threats, so too in prosecutions: Intent matters. “There’s been an across-the-board push within the Trump administration to perceive things as threats and prosecute things as threats that past iterations of the D.O.J. would not have pursued,” Devlin told me. In other words: It is another form of politics.

THE FUTURE OF VOTING

The Supreme Court. Eric Lee for The New York Times

The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s map of congressional voting districts, ruling that lawmakers had illegally used race when drawing up a new majority-Black district.

The court’s conservative justices said the decision upheld the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law that guarantees the rights of minority voters and prohibits voting practices that discriminate against them — even as liberal justices accused the court’s majority of gutting that same law. The decision was 6 to 3, split along ideological lines.

For decades, states have drawn districts that made Black voters a majority, to ensure those voters could elect candidates of their choice. But that practice could change after yesterday’s decision. It’s hard to know which states’ maps will change, but the decision likely will help Republicans in the midterm elections.

Hours after the ruling, Florida lawmakers approved a new map that could give Republicans up to four additional seats. And it’s possible that other Republican-controlled states could attempt even more aggressive redraws, The Times’s Nate Cohn wrote. The maps below show what he calls one plausible outcome:

Note: The current map shows districts as of Oct. 14, 2025. North Carolina passed new maps on Oct. 22, 2025.

More on the Supreme Court

In another decision, the court sided with an anti-abortion clinic challenging a state subpoena of its donor records. The justices also heard arguments over whether the Trump administration could end a humanitarian program that has let thousands of Haitians and Syrians temporarily settle in the U.S. The court appeared closely divided.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Jerome Powell Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

Jerome Powell said he would stay as a governor of the Federal Reserve after his time as chairman ends on May 15. The war in Iran has so far cost $25 billion, Pentagon officials said in a tense congressional hearing. Prosecutors said the suspect in the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting planned the attack weeks before the gala. House Republicans adopted a budget that would provide billions more for immigration enforcement and reopen the Homeland Security Department. Trump’s plan to build a huge arch would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe: That has drawn eye rolls in France. See how the new arch would look from the road.

The New York Times

Around the World

Europe: The continent has warmed twice as fast as the world as a whole, a report found. Caribbean: Jeffrey Epstein used powerful connections in the Middle East to get rare Islamic artifacts to fill a “mosque” on his island.

An image of Epstein’s “mosque” released by the Justice Department. U.S. Justice Department

Artificial Intelligence

Scientists hired by A.I. companies to vet their products’ risks said chatbots described in detail how to create and deploy dangerous biological weapons. U.S. tech giants — Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta — spent a record $130 billion on infrastructure in the first three months of the year, most of it on A.I. data centers.

OPINIONS

Where it replaces human labor, A.I. risks creating a permanent underclass, Jasmine Sun writes.

Here’s a column by Nicholas Kristof on the “cocky authoritarians” blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

A hippo in the wild in Colombia. Raul Arboleda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Endangered: Colombia planned to slaughter as many as 80 hippos descended from the herd of the drug lord Pablo Escobar. An Indian tycoon offered them a home.

Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about how GLP-1s turn down food noise.

SPORTS

M.L.B.: The Washington Nationals’ starting pitcher, Zack Littell, is the highest-paid player on their roster, but not that long ago, he was shooting coyotes to pay the bills.

Men’s college basketball: The N.C.A.A. Tournament is expanding from 68 teams to 76. Here’s why that could be a problem.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

David Malosh for The New York Times

If you can lay your hands on some of the wild king salmon that’s coming out of California right now, and some bright pink-red stalks of rhubarb to boot, you’ll be in seasonal heaven with Melissa Clark’s great recipe for rhubarb roasted salmon. But if it’s farmed fish you’re seeing at the market instead, that’ll work fine — it’s just fattier meat, with a little less flavor. Get some flaky sea salt on there at the end, to help compensate.

THE ENTERTAINERS

Billy Joel Thea Traff for The New York Times

We heard from a lot — like, a lot — of readers about our list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters this week. The responses ran to countless variations on the theme of: You should have included Billy Joel, or Randy Newman, or Stevie Nicks, or Jeff Tweedy. So if you want to submit your own list of the greatest living American songwriters, please participate in our readers’ poll.

And read our critic Lindsay Zoladz on 11 great American songwriters who didn’t make our list.

More on culture

“Here are fallible men, hemmed in by the church, who find divinity in alms and prayer, yes, but also through romance and the arts,” Miguel Salazar writes about Héctor Abad’s new novel, “Aside From My Heart, All Is Well.” It’s a story of worldly enthusiasm, big-hearted and consumed with higher truths. (“Absolute virginity,” one of the priests in it writes, is “much more against nature than my own desires.”) Late night hosts praised King Charles’s sense of humor.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Marki Williams/NYT Wirecutter

Write thank-you notes on real stationery recommended by the arbiters of etiquette at Wirecutter. Bad handwriting? Make like a pal of mine and get yourself a manual typewriter. Handwritten notes send a message of caring even if an analog machine takes care of the penmanship.

Set strong boundaries to help maintain healthy relationships. Here’s how.

Try “The Cold Cold Ground,” the first book in Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series, about a Catholic detective in Northern Ireland at the start of the 1980s. It was published in 2012. First sentence: “The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now.” Let’s go!

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was voltage.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Crossplay and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times and me. See you tomorrow. — Sam

Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

[phkrause]

May 1, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. It’s May Day. Congress voted to fund the Homeland Security Department, ending the longest agency shutdown in history. Royal watchers said King Charles’s visit to the U.S. was a master class in subtle criticism. And more countries are buying gold.

We’ll get to more news below — including a neat look at a collection of Bicentennial schlock. But first, I’m going to turn to the Supreme Court.

Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Strong medicine

The Voting Rights Act was supposed to end discrimination against minority voters. Did it work? A Supreme Court majority thinks so. Its ruling against a Louisiana congressional map this week didn’t knock the 1965 law down, but justices said the measure was no longer as important as it once was.

The language on both sides is dense. Here’s a distillation:

The court’s conservative majority believes that the medicine prescribed by the Voting Rights Act has worked and we don’t need to keep taking it, writes Adam Liptak, our chief legal affairs correspondent. Jim Crow is dead, and official discrimination is rare and illegal. So, the reasoning goes, Louisiana was wrong to use race when it drew up a new majority-Black congressional district.

The liberal minority believes the law was doing what it was designed to do in places with a history of racial discrimination. Striking down a law that was working, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in 2013 about a similar case, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

So what happens now?

Forever redistricting

Nick Corasaniti, who covers voting, does not mince words: The decision “has plunged the nation into a dizzying new era of partisan conflict, most likely ushering in a forever redistricting war that could produce fewer competitive seats in Congress and further polarize American politics.”

That war already has casualties:

Fair representation. States are supposed to redraw congressional maps once a decade to reflect population shifts and ensure the representation of communities within a given jurisdiction. Last year, though, President Trump asked Texas officials to create a rare new mid-decade map that would benefit Republicans in this year’s midterm election cycle. California came back with a new map that favored Democrats. A host of other states, both red and blue, followed. Now Wednesday’s decision has prompted Louisiana and other states to consider new maps immediately. Election lawyers circle.

Competition. The last round of nationwide redistricting in 2021, when both Republicans and Democrats sought to protect their electoral advantages, resulted in far fewer contested races. “Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier,” Nick reports. Wednesday’s decision reinforces that trend.

Evan Turnage, a former congressional aide. Rory Doyle for The New York Times

A pipeline severed

Critics of the decision see a potentially devastating result in the South, reports Rick Rojas, who covers the region. They told Rick that new voting maps there “will not only endanger Black incumbents, some of whom have held office for decades, but also threaten a rising generation of Black Democrats.”

Rick spoke to one of them, Evan Turnage, who left a job on Capitol Hill to return home to Mississippi to build a political career. In March, he lost a primary race for a congressional seat but hoped his experience on the hustings would pay off for him in coming years. His district is vulnerable to redistricting, though. “It’s definitely going to be devastating,” Turnage said.

And the decision could reach beyond Congress, into local governments — into state legislative districts, county boards and city councils. “None of us working on Capitol Hill would have gotten there without that foot in the door,” Representative Shomari Figures of Alabama told Rick.

Related: Louisiana will delay its House primaries after the court rejected its map.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Speaker Mike Johnson Salwan Georges for The New York Times

The House bill that ended the Homeland Security shutdown does not include money for immigration enforcement. Republicans plan to fund ICE separately, using a process that would not risk a Democratic filibuster. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, told lawmakers that Trump didn’t need congressional authorization to continue his war with Iran because the cease-fire deal had paused the clock on a 60-day legal obligation. Trump pulled his nomination of Casey Means for surgeon general. Means, a physician and wellness influencer, had faced opposition over her tepid support for vaccines. Trump instead nominated Nicole Saphier, a breast cancer specialist and former Fox News contributor who has praised vaccines as lifesaving and has at times criticized Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an ineffective messenger. There’s dangerous smog in Phoenix and Salt Lake City. The E.P.A. is letting the cities off the hook and blaming the pollution on foreign countries. Maine’s governor dropped out of the race for a Senate seat that Democrats think they can flip in November. That paves the way for Graham Platner, a progressive newcomer, to challenge Senator Susan Collins.

War in the Middle East

Lebanon: Some frustrated people are now turning to the militant group Hezbollah for support during Israeli attacks. Iran: The new supreme leader issued a rare statement. He said the U.S. had no place in the Gulf region’s future and that Iran planned to keep control of the Strait of Hormuz. American economy: It continued to grow in the first three months of the year, despite the global economic strains from the war in Iran.

Around the World

Europe: A shadowy Islamist group has claimed responsibility for attacks targeting Jews across the continent. Officials are investigating whether it has ties to Iran. Venezuela: The first commercial flight from the U.S. in nearly seven years landed in Caracas. Our reporter was on board. Italy: The prize jury of the Venice Biennale, the world’s most important art exhibition, resigned after it barred Israelis and Russians from awards.

Other Big Stories

Millions of Americans appear to be dropping Obamacare coverage in the months since Congress let subsidies expire. A possible suicide note from Jeffrey Epstein, which his cellmate claimed to have discovered, has been hidden from public view for years. The judge in the lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI said she didn’t want talk of A.I.’s existential threat to humanity to seep into the trial. That could hurt Musk’s case. Camp Mystic, the Texas summer camp where more than two dozen children and counselors died in floods last year, will not reopen this summer.

ASK THE MORNING

In obituaries, you often say that the subject’s mother “ran the household” or “oversaw the household.” How do you determine this? (I understand that you want to avoid “was a housewife.”) | Arlene Weiner | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

William McDonald retired yesterday after 20 years as obituaries editor. In that time, he oversaw more than 24,000 obits. He writes:

Yes, we use that language in place of “homemaker,” which is old-fashioned and maybe a bit demeaning. (“Homemaker” had replaced “housewife.”) We make a determination by reporting: We simply ask family members what parents did as occupations.

OPINIONS

The New York Times

The Supreme Court gave ICE a green light to stop people based on their appearance or accent. This video shows the alarming results.

America has a hidden justice system. We call it “forced arbitration,” and whether you realize it or not, you are almost certainly bound by it, Brendan Ballou writes.

Human made. Human played. 75% off.

Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.

MORNING READS

The diamond is set in a crown made for the British royal family. Tim Graham, via Getty Images

All that glitters: Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, said King Charles III should return the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Read about the jewel’s history.

In hot water: UNESCO honored Iceland’s pool culture. Now locals fear tourists will take over.

Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked story yesterday was about an Indian billionaire giving a home to the drug lord Pablo Escobar’s hippos.

A country music outlaw: David Allan Coe, who wrote “Take This Job and Shove It” and other chart-topping hits, was known for his outlandish exploits, prison tales and obscenity-laden performances. He died at 86.

TODAY’S NUMBER

5.3

— That is the average number of guesses, out of 6, that it took NYT Wordle testers to solve yesterday’s puzzle. They characterize it as a “very challenging” puzzle. Learn more about it here.

SPORTS

N.B.A.: The New York Knicks led by as many as 61 points in a record-setting 140-89 victory over the Atlanta Hawks. The Knicks are headed to the second round of the playoffs.

W.N.B.A.: Caitlin Clark left the Indiana Fever’s preseason game against the Dallas Wings with an injury, the Wings’ Paige Bueckers scored 20 points and No. 1 draft pick Azzi Fudd made her pro debut.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

David Malosh for The New York Times

The Kentucky Derby’s tomorrow and I think you ought to make this recipe for Benedictine tonight, so the flavors really have a chance to marry overnight in the fridge. Benedictine is a classic Louisville dip made of cream cheese, cucumbers, scallions and a little hot sauce. It pairs nicely with crudités, chips or crackers. But — as they say in Kentucky — I’ll tell you what. If you trowel it wall-to-wall onto white bread for crustless sandwiches, the odds are good you’ll have a wonderful race day.

BICENTENNIAL SCHLOCK

Tony Cenicola for The New York Times

As we hurtle toward America’s 250th birthday celebrations this summer, The Times visited the Beinecke Library at Yale to take in one of its quirkier exhibits, assembled in 1976 for the nation’s 200th turn around the sun: The Bicentennial Schlock Collection, totaling just over 100 artifacts.

Among the holdings: dry-cleaner hangers emblazoned with the Declaration of Independence, a Bicentennial burger wrapper, a Bicentennial beer can, a Bicentennial barf bag and, taped to an index card, a withered “all-American novelty condom,” emblazoned with the slogan “One Time for Old Glory.”

More on culture

Miranda Priestly is back for the sequel, opening tonight. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” “invites you into a realm of rarefied privilege that encourages you to lust after and laugh at,” writes Manohla Dargis. “Lust is good for business, after all, and laughter helps ease class resentment.” (“Rated PG-13 for exploitation and despair.”)

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Read “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” Marlon James’s 2014 novel about political violence in Jamaica. It’s a “spoof, nightmare, blood bath, poem,” The Times wrote when it came out, and over its nearly 700 pages, it “eventually takes on a mesmerizing power.” Can confirm.

Face facts: The L.L. Bean Boat and Tote is the best beach bag. (I was glad to see my opinion validated by the sand-dusted vacationers at Wirecutter.)

Take this skin-care quiz before hauling that bag to the seashore.

Take our news quiz.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was continuum.

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

[phkrause]

May 2, 2026

Good morning. How often do you talk to strangers? What’s stopping you?

María Jesús Contreras

Public offering

	By Melissa Kirsch

I went to hear some live music by myself a couple of weeks ago. There were a handful of other people in the small performance space when I arrived, mostly in small groups. I was considering taking out my phone, a habit I try to resist when I’m unoccupied in public, when a man walked up to me and a person standing nearby and said something to the effect of, “We’re all here solo, so we should talk to one another.” I was surprised and charmed by his extroversion. I had assumed I’d have to mill about awkwardly until the show began, the tax one pays for going out alone. But this guy, whose name we quickly learned was Stefan, had treated the barroom as if it were a party he was hosting, or at least a party at which he was determined to not be bored. The three of us chatted as the place filled up, strangers with a common interest in a musician, which was enough of a connection to pleasantly fill a half-hour.

It has become very easy to avoid talking to strangers. Noise-canceling headphones, internet shopping, self-checkout lines and, when all else fails, our phones — taken out at a bar, a party, a concert — insulate us against humanity’s intrusion. It’s not all terrible: I recently made a doctor’s appointment via consultation with my medical practice’s “virtual assistant” and it was refreshingly frictionless. In a city, headphones are indispensable for boundary setting; they send a signal that one is not to be bothered. But when not interacting becomes the default, our social muscles atrophy.

“Far from random human inconveniences, strangers are actually one of the richest and most important resources we have,” the journalist David Sax wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion a few years ago. “They connect us to the community, teach us empathy, build civility and are full of surprise and potentially wonder.”

“Full of surprise and potentially wonder”! Why would we spurn such marvels? “Well,” my antisocial alter ego counters, “strangers are also unpredictable, possibly uninterested in us and sometimes boring.” All true. Is this why I, a person who’s hardly shy, would hesitate to corral the awkward solo concert attendees into conversation? There’s always the risk of rejection, and the risk that I’d feel a responsibility to keep the conversation going even if the people I approached weren’t talkative, a social burden I’d regret. But I was so grateful to Stefan: What a gesture of generosity to extend himself, to relieve others of the awkwardness of standing alone in a space where others are socializing. I try to be this kind of person, the one who breaks the silence, the one who can extend herself, but I’m not always able to silence that alter ego.

I asked Stefan if he’s always “that guy,” the self-appointed social ringleader, the outgoing one who coaxes the wallflowers into the mix. “I’ve come to believe that people simply want fun and interesting things to happen to them,” he said. Why wouldn’t they be receptive to him?

Most of us are thinking about ourselves, about the potential embarrassment that would arise from making an overture to a stranger. Stefan’s thinking about other people, what they expect or desire from a night out, and he’s doing his part to make that a reality. “Engagement with strangers is at the core of our social contract,” Sax wrote in his guest essay. Contracts are agreements: I will do my part and you will do yours; it’s in both of our best interests. The social contract doesn’t explicitly say we have to give other people a good time (or, it might — I haven’t seen an official copy), but it does stipulate that we consider one another and the type of society we want to create.

Sometimes when I’m feeling alienated from the human race, or baffled by the actions of another, I remind myself that every single person wants to be loved. This isn’t a particularly rigorous thought about human psychology, but rather something that seems broadly true. It’s an easily accessed plot of common ground, a starting place for understanding motivations that seem inscrutable. This reminder doesn’t mean I have to love everyone, but it makes their decisions a bit more legible. If I add that everyone wants fun and interesting things to happen to them, me included, I might be more likely to start the conversation with strangers. If we all see it as our contractual duty to generate fun when the opportunity presents itself (and if we can overcome our shyness), then we significantly increase the odds that fun will ensue. And if others don’t hold up their end of the bargain? Then, as Stefan rationalizes, your attempt “gives you a good story to tell your friends.”

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Spirit Airlines has shut down and canceled all flights after the company failed to secure a $500 million bailout it had been seeking from the Trump administration. (If you have a flight booked with Spirit, here’s what you need to know.) Trump said he planned to raise tariffs on European cars and trucks to 25 percent starting next week. The Pentagon announced more deals with A.I. companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia, that let the military employ their tech for “any lawful use,” a standard Anthropic has resisted. (The Pentagon already has deals with OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI.) Maryland became the first state in America to bar grocery stores from using A.I. to charge some customers more than others.

Health

A federal appeals court said abortion providers could not send patients abortion pills by mail, blocking what had become a major avenue for women seeking abortions in recent years. The F.D.A. said it would let some patients with deadly pancreatic cancer get early access to a promising unapproved drug.

Iran War

Republicans in Congress are growing impatient with the war, especially now that Trump has missed a statutory deadline to get lawmakers’ approval to keep fighting. The Pentagon is pulling 5,000 U.S. troops out of Germany. Defense officials said the move was a punishment for Germany, after the country’s chancellor said this week that Iran had “humiliated” the U.S. Iran sent its latest proposal to end the war, but hours later Trump said he was “not satisfied” with it. The Israeli military deployed its Iron Dome missile defense system in the United Arab Emirates, people familiar said — a display of defense cooperation between the countries.

Other Big Stories

The New York Times

The pilots of Jeju Air Flight 2216 faced a cascade of unforgiving decisions after birds hit their engines in December 2024. A Times investigation reveals what went wrong. Leon Botstein, who led Bard College for more than 50 years, is retiring from his post after emails revealed his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. A federal jury found former Representative David Rivera of Florida guilty of secretly lobbying on behalf of the Venezuelan government.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

Fine Arts

The New York Times

The Obama Presidential Center, which opens in Chicago next month, will have a feature unique among presidential libraries: original artwork. A new exhibition at the Louvre compares how Auguste Rodin and Michelangelo — whom Rodin admired as an artistic God — captured humanity’s spirit in stone. The artist Banksy appears to be taking credit for a large statue in London that many interpret as a comment on blind nationalism.

Music

The New York Times

The gayageum player DoYeon Kim has become an in-demand jazz musician — even if some audiences (and collaborators) haven’t heard of her instrument. Britney Spears was charged with a D.U.I. involving drugs and alcohol after officers caught her driving fast and erratically.

Film and TV

The “Broad City” creator Ilana Glazer has a new podcast, stand-up hour and political organizing group, and is raising a 4-year-old daughter. But don’t worry, she still loves weed. “Jim Henson’s Wowsabout!,” a new preschool special, features a quail, a hedgehog, bighorn sheep and a pig. During filming in Sequoia National Park, a bear even approached the set. Alissa Wilkinson, a Times film critic, reviews “The Devil Wears Prada 2” in the video below. Click to play.

The New York Times

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RECIPE OF THE WEEK

David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

By Melissa Clark

Smoky Tomato Soup

The lingering chill in New York has me craving bowls of tomato soup with crisp grilled cheese sandwiches on the side. Alexa Weibel’s smoky tomato soup is a spicier, more adult version that has the complex flavors of ancho chile and smoked paprika while retaining the soup’s inherently sweet, velvety allure. You can adjust the heat to taste by either blending the ancho chile into the soup for more spice or removing it first for less. The gooey grilled cheese sandwiches on the side, however, are nonnegotiable.

REAL ESTATE

Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

The Hunt: A pair of art lovers looked for a home in Minneapolis with space to show off their expanding collection. What did they choose? Play our game.

What you get for $1.5 million in Panama: A three-bedroom house built into a hillside, and two modern condos with ocean views.

A fun house: You may not know the magician Justin Flom, but if you’re someone who scrolls online, you likely know his house. Take a look inside.

Luxury squatters: They move into multimillion-dollar homes. And once they’re there, it can be hard to get them out.

LIVING

Stephen Orr

Flower power: Make your flower beds a riot of harmonious color with these tips.

Longevity: People are living longer these days. That means we have to change how we plan retirement savings.

Travel smart: Our tech columnist tested how Google’s Gemini chatbot fares as a trip planner. His verdict: It’s a powerful helper, with a few weak points.

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Last-minute Mother’s Day gifts (that don’t seem last-minute)

Heads-up: Mother’s Day is next Sunday. If you’re stumped about what to get the moms in your life, fear not. Start by zeroing in on a particular hobby or interest and tailor your gift accordingly (think a smart-tech bird feeder for a bird-watcher, or a vibrant set of watercolors for a painter). And if you’re truly waiting until the 11th hour, we’ve gathered dozens of lovely last-minute gifts for every type of mom, all of which can be delivered to her doorstep within a few days (or to her inbox instantaneously). Perhaps a day pass to a local spa? — Samantha Schoech

GAME OF THE WEEK

Renegade during a training session this week. Alex Slitz/Getty Images

The Kentucky Derby. The most celebrated event in horse racing returns today for its 152nd running. How will you pick your winner? Maybe you’ll just go with the favorite (that’s Renegade, with 4-to-1 odds as of Friday). Or maybe you’ll pick the one with the best name — that might be The Puma or Chief Wallabee. But if you want an edge, The Athletic’s Peter Keating did a deeper analysis, accounting for stamina, style and post position, and determined that the real favorite should be Commandment.

Post time is 6:57 p.m. on NBC.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was childlike.

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

P.S.: We’re looking for New York Times clippings readers have saved over the years, from historic front pages to favorite recipes, to highlight as part of our 175th anniversary celebration. Show us yours here.

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

[phkrause]

May 3, 2026

Good morning.

Nick Corasaniti, a Times reporter who covers politics, has seen Bruce Springsteen in concert so many times he’s lost count. (He’s even written a book, “I Don’t Want to Go Home,” about Springsteen’s most beloved Jersey Shore rock club.) But after seeing the band’s current tour, Nick noted that something was different. In today’s newsletter, he explains.

Bruce Springsteen in Newark last month. Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated Press

The promised land

	By Nick Corasaniti

Bruce Springsteen has always heralded the alchemy of his E Street Band, that 1+1=3, force-of-nature magic that happens when these bar-band veterans join together at the end of the Boss’s four-count.

And after more than 50 years, Springsteen and the band still deliver that alchemy. The euphoric highs and solemn blues of a Springsteen show evoke a religious revival, albeit in the secular big tent of rock ’n’ roll. For the hardened fans, it’s why they keep coming back, ticket prices be damned.

But his current tour, incessantly and overtly political, is unique in the band’s history.

A pointed political message — anti-authoritarian invective aimed at the Trump administration — defines the set, from Springsteen’s monologues to the song selection. It stands out as an artistic artifact, both in his lengthy career and in the current popular music climate. Few artists of Springsteen’s stature have made a Trump-resistance message as central as Springsteen has since President Trump took office for a second time last year.

“We are no longer the land of the free, the home of the brave,” Springsteen said at a recent stop in his home state, New Jersey, as the opening notes to “My City of Ruins” rang in the background. It’s a line he has repeated night after night on this tour, from Minnesota to California. “To many we are now America the reckless, unpredictable, predatory rogue nation. That is this administration and this president’s legacy.”

Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated Press

Trump has taken notice. He has bullied the rock star on social media, calling him “a total loser” and a “very boring singer” and threatening legal retribution.

In response, Springsteen and the band appear to have only cranked their amps louder. The show begins with a thunderous cover of “War” before Max Weinberg’s rapturous snare drum launches into “Born in the U.S.A.” The purposeful placement of this antiwar anthem, often misappropriated as blindly patriotic with its upbeat synth line and rousing chorus, amounts to a reclamation of its true meaning — and a criticism of the American military offensive in Iran.

But their message remains focused solely on political differences. At his show in Austin, Texas, last Sunday, a night after gunshots rang out at the White House correspondents’ dinner, Springsteen condemned the violence and stressed the importance of peaceful debate.

“We also send out a prayer of thanks that our president, nor anyone in the administration, nor anyone attending, was injured at last night’s incident,” Springsteen said. He added, “We can be critical of those in power, and we can peacefully fight for our beliefs, but there is no place in any way, shape or form for political violence of any kind in our beloved United States.”

Hope, dreams and politics

Springsteen, of course, has never shied from politics. He’s endorsed every Democratic candidate for president since 2004. Early in his career, he joined the “No Nukes” protest concert and rallied at the Stone Pony, the Jersey Shore rock club he often frequented, in support of union workers whose factory was closing.

His 2000 song “American Skin (41 Shots)” invoked the 41 bullets that New York police officers fired in the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant holding only a wallet. The title track of the album “Devils and Dust” explored the brutality of the Iraq war from the eyes of a soldier in 2005. A far less known track on that album, “Matamoros Banks” — a dark portrait of the dangers facing migrants trying to cross the U.S. southern border — perhaps did the most to foreshadow Springsteen’s outrage at immigration agents flooding American cities.

Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated Press

While those songs leaned on imagery and implications, though, “Streets of Minneapolis,” the protest song he wrote after federal agents killed two American citizens in Minnesota earlier this year, is exceptionally explicit. As it reached its climax in Jersey last month, Springsteen urged the crowd to repeat the lyric, “ICE out now.”

And yet, if the underlying cause for the tour is concern about the state of the country, the shows remain distinctively Springsteen. Like his blues-in-the-verse, gospel-in-the-chorus method of songwriting, Springsteen offers a prayer for the country not lodged in solemnity, but in jubilation. That while hard times come, hard times also go. And that while music is transformational, a concert is supposed to be joyful for the performers and, more important, for their fans.

“We never planned this tour, but we came out because I needed to feel your hope, your strength, and I needed to hear your voices,” Springsteen said near the end of the show in Jersey, a line he has used throughout the tour and will likely repeat as he performs in Pennsylvania, New York and Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks. “My wish is that we brought some hope and some strength for you tonight.”

Related: Springsteen made The Times’s list of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Representatives Nancy Mace, Anna Paulina Luna and Lauren Boebert. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Three Republican women who helped force the resignations of lawmakers accused of sexual misconduct said they were out to name and shame more offenders. Trump has significantly delayed decisions on federal disaster aid in his second term. Money is flowing especially slowly to states that he lost in the 2024 election, a Times analysis found.

The Middle East

Trump said that he was reviewing Iran’s latest proposal to end the war but that he doubted he would find it acceptable.

Satellite images, photos and videos show the scale of destruction in southern Lebanon nearly two months after Israel relaunched its ground offensive there.

Around the World

Germany: Timmy, a stranded humpback whale, swam free yesterday after the fifth attempt to move him out of shallow waters near the country’s coast succeeded. Brazil: Illegal mining for rare earth minerals is polluting rivers and contaminating soil in the Amazon.

Other Big Stories

A man shot by ICE agents in California last month has been indicted on assault charges. Prosecutors have accused him of hitting federal agents with a car as they tried to arrest him. In Michigan, residents are crossing political lines to oppose a giant data center under construction. In the video below, Sabrina Tavernise explains what’s going on. Click to play.

The New York Times

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Yesterday was the 152nd running of the Kentucky Derby. But with all of the documented problems in horse racing, is it right to continue celebrating the event?

Yes. It’s an iconic American event, celebrated countrywide, where attendees get to dress up for fun, C.L. Brown writes for the Courier Journal: “The big hats, the stylish fascinators, the seersucker suits makes the Kentucky Derby almost like prom for adults, only there’s no curfew to worry about.”

No. The horses are exploited, abused and forced into intensive training, Patrick Battuello writes for LINK nky. Beneath the “well-crafted facade” of the Derby, he writes, “lurks a sinister core, one that abuses and kills beautiful, intelligent, and sensitive animals.”

FROM OPINION

The Supreme Court has halted the Second Reconstruction, Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan write. Congress should enact a new Voting Rights Act.

Here are columns by Ross Douthat on Democrats’ electability and Maureen Dowd on King Charles III.

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MORNING READS

Lauren Jackson/The New York Times

Believing: A love letter to flowers — and to the brief, holy beauty of dying things.

Spy-wear: Palantir, a data-analysis company whose technology has helped the Trump administration track people for deportation, wants people to buy its merch.

Meet Chonkers: A very large sea lion has been drawing crowds to a San Francisco pier. See more of him in the video below. Click to play.

The New York Times

SPORTS

Horse racing: Golden Tempo, a 23-1 long shot, rallied from the rear to win the Kentucky Derby, making Cherie DeVaux the first female trainer to win the race.

N.B.A.: The Philadelphia 76ers defeated the Boston Celtics 109-100 in Game 7 to move forward in the playoffs. They will face the New York Knicks in the Eastern Conference semifinals.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

	By Elisabeth Egan

“The Rolling Stones: The Biography” by Bob Spitz: In his colorful, authoritative take on the much-documented band, Spitz, who has also written biographies of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, delivers an extravagant 704-page account of the Stones’ many peaks and valleys. “Drug busts scatter like flower petals (from opium poppies, perhaps) across the page,” our reviewer wrote, “along with intra-band fistfights, shameless cuckolding of one another with wives and girlfriends, and myriad court battles stemming from possession charges, paternity suits and shady management.” Through it all, the band plays on — and Spitz chronicles its evolution in a way that is faithful, forensic and poetic. Read our review.

More to read: Here are 26 new books coming in May.

THE INTERVIEW

Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

	By Lulu Garcia-Navarro

This week’s subject for The Interview is the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who recently broke with Trump over the war in Iran and began speaking out against him after Trump posted a profane message threatening Iran’s civilian infrastructure on Easter Sunday.

There’s the political case against Trump that you make. But I do want to ask you about the “moral” case that you’ve been making as well. That’s a word that you have used. In [your] monologue responding to Trump’s Easter post, you said that Trump’s comments were “evil.” And I just want to understand that a little bit better. Do you think only his comments are evil, or does the evil extend to Trump himself? Is he evil?

I just want to be really clear that there’s a lot of evil in me and in every person. I’ve certainly experienced it in myself and I have seen it in all people. We’re all capable of evil. So I want to pull back on the judgment and be very precise about what I was saying, which is you cannot mock other people’s gods and put yourself in their place. That is a deal-killer for me. That’s worse than the war with Iran, in my opinion.

I ask because you’ve been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist.

I have not said that.

On your show, the day after Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the Bible during his swearing-in ceremony as president, and you said, “Maybe he didn’t put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book.” And then on a recent show, you went further, saying: “Here’s a leader who’s mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods and exalting himself above them. Could this be the Antichrist?”

I actually did not say, “Could this be the Antichrist?” [He did.] I don’t know where that comes from, but I know that those words never left my lips because I’m not sure I fully understand what the Antichrist is, if there’s just one. I actually tried to understand it. I may have said some are asking that. I am not weighing in on that because I don’t understand it, just to be totally clear.

So to be clear, though, that was not what you were suggesting?

If I thought Trump was the Antichrist, I would just say so. If I understood what the Antichrist is, I’d say so, and I don’t really.

Read more of the interview here. Or watch on YouTube.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

The New York Times Magazine

Read this week’s magazine.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Warm up your white room — no paint or wallpaper required.

Lock up your bike so it doesn’t get nabbed. These are the best locks.

Stop buying citronella candles. Mosquitoes are relentless, and the candles probably won’t stop them from biting you.

MEAL PLAN

Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

There are two types of people: those who think salad can be dinner and those who don’t. If there’s a dinner salad that can win over anyone, it’s this charred broccoli and salmon noodle salad. Still, if salad’s not your thing, Emily Weinstein has some other great dinner recs for you, including chicken all’arrabbiata and beef fried rice.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were belonged, boondoggle and boondoggled.

Can you put eight historical events — including the discovery of insulin, the origins of the “grandfather” clause and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.

Host: Sam Sifton Editor: Adam B. Kushner News Editor: Tom Wright-Piersanti Associate Editor: Lauren Jackson News Staff: Evan Gorelick, Brent Lewis, Lara McCoy, Karl Russell Saturday Writer: Melissa Kirsch Editorial Director, Newsletters: Jodi Rudoren

[phkrause]

May 4, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

Good morning. President Trump said that the U.S. would help guide stranded ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, giving few details about how. And the Met Gala is tonight in New York City. Who are you wearing?

We’ll get to more news below. But first, let’s answer some of your questions.

Military recruitment is the subject of one reader question. Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Asked and answered

One of the great things about working on The Morning is that we can call our colleagues in the newsroom to ask questions about their areas of expertise. Their answers are this newsletter’s beating heart.

Today the questions come from you, our indefatigably curious readers. Among other things, they’re about how wise it is for the president to bring his whole cabinet to events like the White House correspondents’ dinner, the reality of a military draft and whether it’s worse for the environment to eat meat or use A.I. Answers, please!

Government

Is it normal (or advisable) for the president and vice president and many members of the cabinet all to attend the same event, as they did at the White House correspondents’ dinner? | Paula Emery | Plainfield, Vermont

Luke Broadwater, a White House correspondent, writes:

It’s not unusual. But the recent shooting raises questions about whether it’s prudent. White House officials are mulling whether the vice president should attend when the dinner is rescheduled. The executive branch also makes sure everyone from the line of succession is never in the same place at the same time.

Is it true that there will be an automatic draft registration for men between the ages of 18 and 25 starting in December? | Kathy Edelen | Cincinnati, Ohio

Eric Schmitt, who covers the Pentagon, writes:

Yes, under a rule pending final approval. No one has been drafted since the all-volunteer military was established in 1973 — and that’s not going to change anytime soon. But young men (yes, it’s only men) have been required to register for the draft, just in case the military needs them. Now, instead of filling out a form online, they’ll be automatically enrolled by the government.

Climate

Is eating meat as harmful for the environment as using ChatGPT or other A.I. tools? | Emily Osborn | Salt Lake City, Utah

Evan Gorelick, a reporter for The Morning, writes:

This is a little like comparing apples to oranges, so the numbers won’t be perfect. But let me try:

Asking a medium-length question on ChatGPT can use 20 to 30 watt-hours of energy, according to recent estimates. (That’s enough to toast a slice of bread!) The carbon footprint depends where the data centers are and where their electricity comes from — though it’s mostly from fossil fuels, which emit lots of carbon. Researchers estimate that a chatbot query can emit the equivalent of between seven and 15 grams of carbon dioxide. Call it 11 grams. So in 30 minutes, you might spew something like 110 grams.

Beef, the most carbon-intensive meat, emits the equivalent of around 6,040 grams of carbon dioxide per serving — a lot more than an A.I. prompt.

But prompting isn’t the only way A.I. affects the environment. There’s also the water it drains and the energy that goes into training new models. OpenAI’s older model consumed about 50 gigawatt-hours during its training. (That’s enough to toast nearly two billion slices of bread!) Newer and bigger models could consume significantly more. On a per-person level, the carbon output is still probably less than cow farming, but it’s rising quickly.

What happened to the big U.S. push toward electric vehicles? Now that the price of gas is surging, has their time come? | Marc Posnock | New York City

Jack Ewing, who covers the auto industry, writes:

Washington turned against electric vehicles after Donald Trump became president. Congress eliminated a $7,500 tax credit for buyers last year, causing sales to plunge. But rising gas prices strengthen the argument for E.V.s, because electricity is almost always cheaper. And electric vehicles are becoming more affordable: Used models sell for about the same as comparable gasoline-powered cars. All of which may explain a recent revival. Monthly sales of new E.V.s rose 20 percent in March. Used ones soared 54 percent.

Source: Cox Automotive | by Lily Boyce

Is there any good news (from anywhere in the world) regarding shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources? | Monika C. Jansen | Evergreen, Colorado

David Gelles, who covers the climate, writes:

Yes! The adoption of renewable and low-carbon energy sources is booming around the world. Solar is now the cheapest form of energy in human history. From installations that can power cities to single panels on residential balconies, solar panels are getting installed at unprecedented rates. We’ve also seen tremendous growth in wind energy, electric vehicles and grid-scale batteries. Other renewable technologies — including nuclear, geothermal and even fusion — are progressing toward the marketplace.

Got a question for The Morning? Ask it here.

WATCH AND LEARN

Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times

Take-home writing assignments, once inescapable in your English and history classes, are on the way out. It’s too easy for students to cheat with artificial intelligence. Chatbots can generate polished essays in seconds — analyzing Supreme Court cases, parsing symbolism in “The Great Gatsby,” explaining the science behind the Artemis mission.

But teachers have a fix: They’re making students write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. The assignments have changed too. Some educators ask students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve read — the type of writing A.I. struggles to produce.

Read more about the resurgence of paper and pencil.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that the F.B.I. had evidence against James Comey beyond his “86 47” social media post and that others who shared similar messages on social media would not be prosecuted. Video from the White House correspondents’ dinner analyzed by The Times appears to show that the suspect in the attack shot at a Secret Service officer who then returned fire. U.S. officials visited Venezuela last week. In the video below, our White House correspondent Tyler Pager describes the main message of the trip. Click to play.

The New York Times

Around the World

The Darvasa crater in Turkmenistan last year. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Turkmenistan: The flames appear to be fading at one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions, a gas crater known as the “Gates to Hell.” The West Bank: With the world’s attention focused on war with Iran, extremist Israeli settlers have stepped up attacks on Palestinians in the territory. Russia: Recruiting companies are promising jobs to Africans who say they are then forced to fight in Ukraine. Atlantic Ocean: Three people died on a cruise ship after a suspected outbreak of hantavirus, a rare family of viruses carried by rodents, the W.H.O. said.

Other Big Stories

Taking away phones in school didn’t do much to improve academic achievement, a major new study found. A United Airlines flight struck a light pole while landing in Newark and damaged a tractor-trailer traveling along the New Jersey Turnpike.

OPINIONS

Yuppies — young urban professionals — changed America. That change wasn’t always for the best, Dylan Gottlieb writes.

The race for governor of California is full of uninspiring candidates, Michelle Cottle writes. She says Democrats risk a shutout if the party cannot pick a favorite.

Here’s a column by Ezra Klein on why A.I. probably won’t produce a job apocalypse.

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Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year and play in the app without any distractions. You’ll also get full access to Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more.

MORNING READS

An emergency department in Los Angeles. Morgan Lieberman for The New York Times

Is it urgent? We asked experts when you should use urgent care, and when you’re better off visiting an ER or primary care doctor.

A 2-million-square-foot equalizer: Hatred of data centers is, according to one comedian, “the most bipartisan issue since beer.”

Three generations lost: After his mother, brother and 15-month-old niece died when fire tore through an apartment complex, one man is fighting to hold the Hong Kong authorities accountable.

Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was a video of a massive sea lion.

Metropolitan Diary: Bargain basement advice.

Witness: Jack Thornell’s photographs captured the shooting of James Meredith, the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. and other wrenching moments of the civil rights struggle. He died at 86.

SPORTS

N.B.A.: The Detroit Pistons advanced to the Eastern Conference semifinals with a 116-94 victory over the Orlando Magic in Game 7 of their first-round series.

Golf: The DC Preservation League filed an emergency stay request to halt the Trump administration’s plans to take over and renovate the East Potomac Golf Links, Washington’s largest public golf course.

A new newsletter: No Offseason will catch you up on the biggest stories in women’s basketball. Sign up here.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

I made these baked chicken thighs the other day to serve alongside roasted potatoes — those little ones, smaller than golf balls, that have lately become a supermarket staple — and a simple slaw of sliced red cabbage and lacinato kale tossed with a creamy, herb-laden vinaigrette. I dusted the finished potatoes with Old Bay seasoning because it tastes of summer, a season I am very much looking forward to. Weeknight cooking doesn’t have to be difficult. The meal was delicious.

TODAY’S NUMBER

7.2 million

— That is roughly how many single-family homes in the United States are empty but not for sale. For many owners, putting these “zombie homes” on the market just isn’t worth it. Why is that?

GAME TIME

From left, Melissa Clark, Kate Hudson and Brenda Song. Taylor Miller for The New York Times

Kate Hudson and Brenda Song star in “Running Point,” the Netflix sports comedy series about a dysfunctional family that owns a fictional Los Angeles basketball team. They came to our studio kitchen recently to make pretzels with my colleague Melissa Clark. Roll it. 🏀🥨

More on culture

We need only five minutes to get you to love the big belters of musical theater. Here’s Lea Michele on Barbra Streisand; Jennifer Hudson on Jennifer Holliday; Adam Lambert on Cynthia Erivo; and Christine Ebersole on Patti LuPone. Sing! Nieves González, a 29-year-old painter in Spain, once worked in relative obscurity. Her portrait of the British singer Lily Allen changed that. It now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

A still from Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” (1964), performed at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. Audience members took turns snipping away at Ono’s clothing. Filmed by David and Albert Maysles © Yoko Ono

Consider Yoko Ono. T Magazine did: Amanda Fortini unpacks the modern relevance of Ono’s radical art.

Use a park bench to get a full-body workout. No gym required!

Embrace the dad aesthetic and install one of these smart bird feeders recommended by the amateur ornithologists at Wirecutter. You’ll thank me when your phone alerts you to the scarlet tanager in your yard.

Take our news quiz.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was turncoat.

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

[phkrause]

May 5, 2026

	By Sam Sifton

The Met Gala was last night — shouts to the Carter family of Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Blue Ivy for a late and feathery arrival. “I cannot properly convey the decibel level in this tent — there are limits to the English language,” our Callie Holtermann reported from the red carpet when they arrived. To start today, we’re going to hear from Stella Bugbee, our Styles editor, about some of the best looks from fashion’s biggest night.

Stella?

Beyoncé and Blue Ivy, her daughter. The New York Times

Night at the Museum

April showers bring May galas!

Yes, it’s that time of year again where we gather to watch the spectacle of the Costume Institute’s annual party — a parade of opulence and sartorial invention displayed on some of the world’s most famous people.

And this year’s Met Gala was one for the ages! For starters, Beyoncé came. She hasn’t appeared at a Met Gala in a decade, and this year she hosted it. The big surprise was not her jeweled exoskeleton by Olivier Rousteing — after her absence, it would have been enough for her to show up in a potato sack — but that she was accompanied by her daughter. Minors do not typically attend, so it was exciting (even a little transgressive?) to see Blue Ivy Carter’s entrance.

For another, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, provided the main source of funding for the exhibition and the party itself. The activist group Everyone Hates Elon called for a boycott, and posters appeared in New York City saying that the gala was “brought to you by worker exploitation.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani skipped the ball to celebrate New York City garment workers.

Yet the show went on. The dress code for the evening was “Fashion Is Art,” a theme that matches with the spring show, “Costume Art,” which makes the case that fashion connects every other gallery in the museum. Very meta! Paintings, sculptures, artifacts and photographs from across the museum have been paired with garments that relate to those works in an exhibition that will delight fashion and art nerds equally.

Individual tickets are a whopping $100,000 — $25,000 more than last year. The event has already broken last year’s $31 million record haul, bringing in a reported $42 million this year.

Here are some of the most notable looks:

Eileen Gu

Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

A dress for making wonder? This one, by Iris van Herpen, was constructed of 15,000 glass balls. A tiny spout hid a machine that spewed bubbles, surrounding Gu in an ethereal cloud.

Doechii

Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

For a star who truly understands the impact of fashion, there was more fabric on the top of her head than on the rest of her body. Even her feet were bare!

Connor Storrie

Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

Yves Saint Laurent was an official sponsor of this year’s gala. Storrie’s high-necked shirt with his exposed shoulders stood out among the many stars who wore the brand on the cobblestone carpet — a supremely confident display of androgynous formal wear.

Naomi Osaka

Nina Westervelt and Amir Hamja for The New York Times

Osaka’s Robert Wun dress mimics stigmata — the little red feathers reference spurts of blood. It’s a radical statement, but blink and you might miss it. (There’s a similar piece in the exhibit, if you happen to make it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Heidi Klum

Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

I love a woman who commits to the bit, and nobody on earth goes harder on a costume than Klum. She was, perhaps, the celebrity who took the “Fashion Is Art” theme most to heart, dressing as a marble statue.

Sign up to receive The Fashions, our newsletter on high and low styles. Back to you, Sam.

THE YEAR’S BEST JOURNALISM

M. Gessen, left, won a Pulitzer Prize for opinion writing. Our publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, is on the right. Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The first Monday in May is often a special day at The New York Times. That’s when Columbia University announces the Pulitzer Prizes — basically, the Oscars of journalism. I’ve attended the accompanying newsroom celebration for almost 25 years, and it never gets old. It’s a moving couple hours of applause, reflection, thanks-giving and joy. Winning journalists bring their family members — long-suffering spouses, parents, children — and editors beam while they describe the way the winning work came together. Nobody in this profession does that work for prizes, of course, but recognition is pretty cool. (The Times has taken home 148 Pulitzers since 1918.)

The Times and The Athletic, its sister sports publication, won four Pulitzer Prizes yesterday. (We’ve taken down the paywall for the links in this section, and the articles are all free to read.)

Our staff won the investigative award for articles that examined the huge cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence deals that Trump family members and allies have landed with foreign interests, while swaying U.S. national security policies.

Saher Alghorra won an award for haunting images he made that show the devastation and starvation in war-torn Gaza.

Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

The Times columnist M. Gessen won the opinion writing award for reported essays about the threats of autocracy at home and abroad.

And Pablo Torre, a podcaster, won for reporting on a secret sponsorship deal with an environmental start-up that let the L.A. Clippers circumvent the N.B.A. salary cap so that they could pay Kawhi Leonard, the team’s star forward. The show, “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” appears through The Athletic.

It wasn’t just us, of course. The prize for public service, considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers, went to The Washington Post for covering the purge of government workers and the closure of government agencies last year. (Times reporters were also finalists for their coverage of immigration, U.S. humanitarian aid, child sex trafficking in Los Angeles, medical treatment for transgender children and drone warfare in Ukraine.)

I also loved this series from The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica about how car-towing companies were overcharging residents. It won for local reporting. Please subscribe to your local news outlets. Their work, covering communities and holding local leaders to account, is endangered.

And it really is about the work, even on Pulitzer day. I’ll never forget the awards in 2013. I was the national editor, watching the speeches in the newsroom while sitting next to Kit Seelye, then the Boston bureau chief. Phones started chirping as news of the Boston Marathon bombings broke. John Eligon, one of our reporters, had just run the race. He grabbed a notebook and started reporting as Kit high-tailed it for the train. The next year, our photographer Josh Haner won a Pulitzer for his images documenting the painful, long-term recovery of one of the victims in the attack.

Here’s a list of all this year’s winners, including those for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and music.

THE LATEST NEWS

Politics

Vessels around Musandam, Oman. Reuters

Iran’s top negotiator accused the U.S. of violating the shaky cease-fire, after Iranian forces fired at vessels that the U.S. Navy was guiding through the Strait of Hormuz. The Supreme Court temporarily restored access to the abortion pill mifepristone by mail, which a lower court had blocked last week. (The Times is tracking abortion laws around the country.)

Primary Day

In Indiana, President Trump has called on voters to oust seven Republican lawmakers who opposed his push to redraw the state’s voting map. It’s part of his effort to punish members of his party who cross him. Ohio voters will decide the candidates for the state’s governor and Senate races, both of which could be competitive in November.

Around the World

Kenny Holston for The New York Times

Alaska: As global competition for the Arctic heats up, the U.S. military is preparing its soldiers to fight in the freezing cold. India: The Hindu nationalist party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi took control of West Bengal, an opposition stronghold, for the first time. Venezuela: Trump promised transparency in the country’s economy after the removal of Nicolás Maduro. But the country’s oil industry remains a black hole.

OPINIONS

The Republican Party is in trouble if “normie” members — neither MAGA die-hards nor Never Trumpers — sit out the midterms, Kristen Soltis Anderson writes.

Here are columns by Thomas Edsall on how Trump feels about losing and Michelle Goldberg on “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”

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MORNING READS

From left, a director giving notes to actors, a video editor creating content, an A.I. generated action scene. Wang Yushun

A.I. drama: Until recently, making the kind of short-form, soapy shows popular in China meant hiring actors, renting sets and spending weeks filming and editing. Now it can be done with no cameras, no crew and no human performers.

Getting out: The Watson family were dairy farmers in Pennsylvania for generations until this spring, when they could no longer make the math add up.

Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about “zombie homes” — properties where no one lives, but aren’t for sale.

TODAY’S NUMBER

5,651

— That is how many Yankees games the radio play-by-play announcer John Sterling called over a more than 30-year career that ended in 2024. The “Voice of the Yankees” died yesterday. He was 87.

SPORTS

M.L.B.: The Padres closer Mason Miller went 35 games without giving up a run. Jayson Stark says it’s a dominant pitching streak unlike any other in M.L.B. history, and he has the stats to back it up.

Snooker: The World Championship of snooker, a cue-ball sport similar to billiards, has been drawing lots of headlines.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Ghazalle Badiozamani for The New York Times

I always keep a bag of frozen potstickers in the freezer, because there are some weeknights when I’m starving and the last thing I want to do is cook something complicated. So: dumplings and greens. Sauté the frozen wontons in a little oil until they’re well browned on one side. Fish them out of the pan, and then sauté some kale with ginger and garlic. Put the dumplings on top of the greens, splash the pan with water, rice wine or a mixture of both, then cover the pan to heat everything through. Serve with soy sauce, black vinegar, chopped cilantro, sesame seeds and chile crisp. Dinner in 20 minutes!

SOUTHERN GOTHIC

Kathryn Stockett Thea Traff for The New York Times

Seventeen years after her first novel, “The Help,” became a controversial megahit, Kathryn Stockett is back with a second, “The Calamity Club.” It’s about three Mississippi women navigating poverty and misogyny during the Great Depression. Elisabeth Egan profiled the author. “I wrote this thing for so long,” Stockett told her. “I felt like everything I touched was failing.” And Lauren Christensen reviewed the book: “pure, hell-raising entertainment.”

More on culture

Is eating less food the secret to loving it? No. Pete Wells, who was our restaurant critic, explores the case for leaving self-denial behind and embracing pleasure and enjoyment instead. Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni settled their legal dispute, after accusations of a smear campaign and harassment. Late-night hosts will miss having Spirit Airlines to kick around.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

A section of Romare Bearden’s “Cityscape.”  Romare Bearden Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Look at Romare Bearden’s “Cityscape,” a huge mural that hangs in Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Really look at it — for 10 minutes, if you can. See what you discover.

Filter the allergen-laden air in your home with the best air purifier tested by the decontaminationists at Wirecutter.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was flighty.

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